Cookie Consent by Free Privacy Policy website Palazzo Strozzi in Florence will be hosting Radical Utopias. Beyond Architecture: Florence 1966–1976
november 22, 2017 - Palazzo Strozzi

Palazzo Strozzi in Florence will be hosting Radical Utopias. Beyond Architecture: Florence 1966–1976

From 20 October 2017 to 21 January 2018 Palazzo Strozzi in Florence will be hosting Radical Utopias. Beyond Architecture: Florence 1966–1976, an exhibition curated by Pino Brugellis, Gianni Pettena and Alberto Salvadori in conjunction with Elisabetta Trincherini, celebrating the outstanding creative season enjoyed by the Radical Movement in Florence in the 1960s and '70s. In a kaledoscopic dialogue involving objects of #design, videos, installations, performances and narratives, the exhibition brings together for the very first time in a single venue the visionary work of such groups and figures as Archizoom, Remo Buti, 9999, Superstudio, Gianni Pettena, UFO and Zziggurat, groups and individuals who succeeded in turning Florence into the hub of a creative revolution that was to have a profound impact on the development of art at the global level. The exhibition comprises 320 exhibits ranging from clothing, jewels, fabrics, porcelain, lamps, furniture, photographs, photomontages and collages to scale models and designs. Radical Utopias brings together all the Florentine Radical architects for the first time, half a century after the origin and spread of their movement between 1966 and 1976. This generation of artists – who started out as students gravitating primarily around Florence University's Faculty of Architecture – was the first in Italy to adopt an original approach to the sweeping renewal of the discipline of architecture as part of a search for a new way of conjugating architectural utopia with research based on the most advanced forms of technology, a process that was already taking place on the international level thanks to such groups and individuals as Hollein and Pichler in Vienna, the Archigram in London, the Metabolists in Japan, Yona Friedman in France, Buckminster Fuller in the United States, Frei Otto in Germany, or Costant and Debord's Situationist Movement in France and the Netherlands. Initially labelled "Superarchitecture", "counterdesign", "conceptual architecture" or "utopia", the Florentine Radical Architecture movement's chief distinguishing feature was an original and fertile interaction between architectural research and the visual arts, taking it beyond architecture as the exhibition title explains. Characteristically, the Florentine avant-garde architects' "radical" role lay in profoundly renewing #design strategies and conceptual platforms, a feature apparent also in their urban performances and operational short-circuits, with global theorisation and conceptual input translated into both interior architectural #design and the urban space. The exhibition sets out to acquaint the visitor with the movement's formative and productive years, illustrating both the international context in whose wake its radical research flourished, and the impressive legacy that it left to subsequent generations in the shape of such celebrated architects as Bernard Tschumi, Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas. In fact it is no mere coincidence that most of the leading radical protagonists' works and materials now form part of the collections of such major museums as the MoMA in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal, the FRAC Centre in Orleans and the MAXXI in Rome. The exhibition illustrates the central role that the city of Florence continues to boast to this day in the wake of a moment in history in which it was a leading player in the contemporary world: the years of the foundation and dissemination of Radical Research between 1966 and 1976. Archizoom and Superstudio first emerged in an exhibition entitled Superarchitettura in Pistoia in December 1966, just as Florence itself was emerging from the murky waters of the dramatic flood that struck the city on 6 November of that year, whilst Pettena and Ufo were already working both inside and outside the university by then. Shaking off the cultural dross and architectural infatuations embodied in the legacy of Rationalism, the Radicals began to engage in the demolition of the discipline, adopting guerrilla tactics, short-circuits and Trojan horses, transgressing in their determination to rock the very foundations of a grey, bourgeois and monotonous society that had no time for the contemporary cultural debate. While the Radicals operated on various different and occasionally inconsistent levels, they constantly displayed an irreverent, sardonic and cutting irony towards a totally unaware society, thus effectively staging the clash between the establishment and the new generations who were clamouring for their own space.


Radical Utopias 

Beyond Architecture: Florence 1966–1976 

Promoted and organised by the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, the Fondazione CR #firenze and the Osservatorio per le Arti Contemporanee Florence, Palazzo Strozzi, Strozzina 20 October 2017–21 January 2018 www.palazzostrozzi.org - #UtopieRadicali