What future for Italian architecture

In January editorial, Nicola di Battista confronts the MAXXI architecture collection with the exhibition “Comunità Italia” at Milan Triennale to state the need of a more clear and shared language for the Italian architecture.

Mostra permanente “Collezione/Composizione”, MAXXI, Roma

This article was originally published on Domus 998, January 2016.

Two recent exhibitions have drawn attention to Italian architecture in the second half of the past century: one at the MAXXI in Rome, and the other at the Milan Triennale.

In Rome the process leading up to the institution of a national museum of architecture has reached its conclusion, with the opening of a permanent exhibition of material from its collections. In Milan the exhibition “Comunità Italia” illustrates Italian architecture from 1945 to 2000. The two events are completely different. But they deal with the same subject and work on the same materials: the Italian architecture of our recent past. We have looked at them together because they have taken place at the same time, albeit for entirely dissimilar purposes. In Rome the museum dedicated to 20th century and contemporary Italian architecture – established by law way back in 1999 – is at last taking shape. It has taken shape with an exhibition devised to give a permanent account of a significant part of the material contained in the collections held by the museum, outstanding among which are the most prestigious and complete collections dedicated to the works of three undisputed masters: Pier Luigi Nervi, Aldo Rossi and Carlo Scarpa, with their thousands of drawings, models, photo reproductions and documents.

Now if these three giants of Italian architecture clearly, and also geographically, represent this country, the rest of the collections, albeit extraordinary and of great value taken case by case, is a bit too Rome-centric. Probably the institution of this museum has reached us too belatedly – think for example of what was done on the same subject, in the 1980s, by other European countries like France or Germany – and today it has unfortunately become very complicated to select and acquire the most important and significant archives of that historical period. However, much can still be done, especially as regards not only individual architects, but for the numerous institutional archives, both public or private, that risk disappearing due to unawareness or to the incapacity of the institutions themselves: they are still waiting for someone to concern themselves with them, for someone to take care of them.

That is why it is so important for our country at last to have a national museum in which to gather, conserve and exhibit this type of material, opening it to anybody interested in visiting it. The fact that from now on an eminent institutional context like that of the Museum of Twentieth Century Arts can preserve our records of Modern architectural production and bring it out of its fenced enclosures to be shown to the general public, and not only to architectural circles, is to be hailed as a major event for the whole of Italy and for anyone who cares about these matters.

We do not think that good architecture need an infinite number of languages

In Milan the exhibition “Comunità Italia”, on Italian architecture in the second half of the twentieth century, curated by Alberto Ferlenga and Marco Biraghi and mounted at the Triennale, tells, as the curators say, a story so rich and varied that it is even impossible to unify. For this reason the exhibition is staged with a selection of original drawings and architectural models that seek by their evidence to include all the possible positions highlighted in that period, none excluded. It being hardly sensible and in any case impossible to include everything, the exhibition has chosen the works to be or not to be exhibited. But this is not stated by the curators, thus giving the impression that what is on view really represents everything produced in this period, which it clearly doesn’t. The exhibition starts from the assumption that the large and diversified output of that period, though impossible to unify, did however express protagonists and works of absolute quality, whose common denominator lies in their having learnt to reckon with the physical environment left to us by the past.

To talk about architecture in such generic terms can, we think, be truly misleading. On looking at the past one ought to say which architects, which architecture or at least which tendencies did indeed reckon with the physical environment that has shaped our territory in the course of time. From this point of view therefore, among the architects included in the exhibit, to tell the truth there do not seem to be many that have based their work on issues of this type; certainly only very few of them worked on the basis of the places in which their designs were situated, whereas the majority are instead superimposed on the places, imposing their own forms on them, at times with arrogance and at other times unconsciously because it was not felt necessary to do so, whilst perhaps ostensibly claiming the opposite.

As an architect, I ask myself why continue to draw up lists of everything and its opposite, what purpose can they serve and for whom? Would it not be better to express critical apparatuses which fix precise viewpoints that can be shared clearly and unambiguously, giving us the instruments needed to judge a work with a proper awareness? Would it not be better today to work on the construction of new theories to back the architect’s work, as our culture admirably did for a few decades, from the end of the war until the ‘80s, with very successful results and critical acclaim?

It is important to work for durability as opposed to the provisional

By working for durability as opposed to the provisional – which seems instead to have become the most striking aspect of architectural output in recent decades – and seeking, selecting and studying those experiences, figures and thoughts that can help us to express the architecture that we need. We, too, believe, like the exhibition’s curators, that Italy in the second half of the twentieth century produced a large number of excellent architects and, let us add, a few masters. But we do not find many threads linking them to one another and, most of all we feel that in recent years each of them has increasingly worked on their own behalf, without further consideration for the community as a whole. In this way they have represented only themselves and no longer a collective outlook on how to carry on building the human city, and with it the places of our habitation, from private to public. Given the stakes involved, if we want to focus on our time and to raise the issue of what present and also of what future we can imagine for Italian architecture, we must do so firstly as citizens and not as architects; we must do so as individuals or as a community of persons, who live and inhabit a house, a place or territory, a city or suburb or the country.

It is we as citizens who must look for ways to express opinions and points of view, not derived only from our profession or from the discipline in which we happen to be competent or familiar with, but from the fact that we are inhabitants, from the fact that we inhabit the present. As citizens, we ought then to be able to ask architecture firstly: what contents it bases its actions upon and how it then manages to transfigure them into architectural forms worthy of our time and of the territories and places designated to accommodate them. That is why it is important, wherever possible, to contribute to defining these contents, by discussing and selecting them before they are implemented, so as to share them clearly and with the least possible ambiguity. Here we are clearly talking about what to do; it is this that has to be shared first of all among people. This is by now an absolute necessity to be answered for the benefit of our civilised living. In our time we cannot go on building things that are not widely shared, which citizens do not see or perceive as essential, beneficial and useful to their lives. Only a question thus framed, aware and widely shared, not only by the elites but by large numbers of people, can give architects those real and necessary contents needed as the cornerstone of their efforts; only thus can they receive useful and sufficient material to apply to their craft.

**In apertura:** Mostra permanente “Collezione/Composizione”, MAXXI Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI secolo, Roma. Photo Musacchio Iannello. Courtesy of Fondazione MAXXI, Roma. **Qui sopra:** “Comunità Italia”, Triennale di Milano. Photo Gianluca Di Ioia

At this point we can also go back to seeing everything as architects, and to do so it would be advisable to reflect on the statement by the curators of the exhibition, when they say that the architecture of our recent past has produced “an incomparable linguistic variety”, and try to understand what this means for us today. We do not think that good architecture, good cities and good landscapes, in a word, good habitation, need an infinite number of languages. We do not think that the quality of architecture depends on this hyper-production of linguistic varieties. Compared to the Italian architecture of our recent past, we think on the contrary, that it makes more sense to claim that precisely that incomparable output has been its problem, not its quality. Architecture, unlike the other arts, is a collective art. It does not need numerous languages to express itself. Linguistic variety is not among its necessities. The time has come to recognise that its apparent vitality in recent decades has given only the sensation of moving forward. In reality, the architects, by working in the belief that they alone can design their present, have failed to build valid alternatives to the cities of speculation, to the cities of markets and finance, to the cities that pursue the interests of the few, against the cities desired by the many. It must be recognised that this state of affairs has well expressed and produced, in fact, with a marked sense of temporariness, exactly the opposite of what a place designed for good habitation ought to express, since in architecture what matters is durability, not the provisional.

Architecture, unlike the other arts, is a collective art

I refer clearly to a durability commensurate to the lives of human beings and their cycles, and not of course to a historical durability which is a different kettle of fish. The durability concerned with our lives, our living and our stability. An architecture is not, cannot be and must never be the quest for new for its own sake, a quest for the bizarre; architecture is exactly the opposite: it must leave barbarous inventions aside, as Palladio said. If it is true, as many say, that modern Italian architecture produced, from the end of the war to the 1980s, clear and precise stances, capable of creating real and concrete alternatives of progress to its time, then we should start again from there. We should look moreover for those who in later years succeeded in advancing those qualities and that thinking, maybe in a minority and isolated way, outside the fashionable media channels, but with commitment and perseverance aimed to make those materials the basis available to our time, so that the younger generations can build a new architecture worthy of the present and in keeping with it, but this time as the declared heir to a positive past to be proud of and which belongs to us.

We do not want to go forward in disarray and in solitude, in pursuit of personal whims that pretend to change the world. We want instead to forge an outlook shared by the largest possible number of people, with the capacity to realise an architecture fit for our lives and for those of many others. That is the future that we want and would like Italian architecture to implement.

What future for Italian architecture

In January editorial, Nicola di Battista confronts the MAXXI architecture collection with the exhibition “Comunità Italia” at Milan Triennale to state the need of a more clear and shared language for the Italian architecture.

Latest on Domus