A widespread conviction sees Italian society afflicted by a pathetic inferiority complex, counterbalanced by an unbridled passion for all things foreign. No one is better at dishing out ferocious judgement on his own country than the average Italian, who is yet exceptionally willing to over-appreciate the attention that other countries lavish on the most obvious cultural expressions, starting with contemporary architecture.
Therefore, the attempt to map out new quality architecture in Italy might seem like an audacious and singular idea to some. The xenophile frenzy of juries, jurors and clients who for many years have awarded first prize to architects who easily miss out on the genius loci of the place for which they are designing and the objective backwardness in cultural and economic terms - with respect to a more effervescent Europe; the Italian territory into a very arduous battleground where the talent is measured of young and not-so-young architects whose fate it was to be born here.
This Domus “atlas”, based on the good projects found by Domus mostly among the ones generously e-mailed to us upon our open invitation, is a snapshot in time that can be read as an initial tally of architects who are destined to produce (hopefully sometime soon) a new situation in contemporary architecture all over Italy that is more egalitarian in quality and diffusion. Stefano Casciani

P.S. Out of the hundreds of projects received, a small number of those selected are published at greater length in the magazine, the rest will be presented on domusweb in the section Architetti italiani.