Unidentified Flying Object for Contemporary Architecture

Description

The first monographic publication focused on the Florentine UFO group (1968-1978), that conducts a historical analysis of its work, reveals its close relationship with the contemporary artistic, literary and architectural avant-garde and, finally, investigates its legacy for the contemporary project. 

The contemporary context is defined by a unique conjuncture. On one hand, we witness the revival of the Radical Architecture that from the avant-garde experiments of the origins recovers creative processes and iconographic fragments while nullifying the original ideological and political values. On the other hand, we see social protests in defense of fundamental rights of democracy, as in 1968. With these premises, Architecture is now reinvestigating those ephemeral experiments that have endured half a century as new “stone monuments” capable of indicating new perspectives for both research and design. 

Placing UFO group, one of the authors of those still poorly known “monuments”, at the core of the contemporary debate means investigating their formal and seductive aspects, but also the ideological, political and social values with which objects, installations and happenings have been innervated, transforming them into devices of an architecture nourished by literature, art and political commitment for the foundation of an eloquent and activist project even more radical than the well-known Superstudio and Archizoom. The collaboration between Beatrice Lampariello, an architecture historian specialized in the 1960s and 1970s, and False Mirror Office, a group of historians and designers engaged in the rediscovery of UFO group, lead to a monograph focused on the UFO’s work and an evaluation of their legacy relative to contemporary architecture. 

This monograph is composed of three sections: 1) History, a first-ever study of UFO by False Mirror Office via analysis of all archival and bibliographic sources, as well as a series of interviews with UFO members and a collection of its writings (published and unpublished), for the first time translated into English; 2) Context, composed of essays by historians and architectural theorists (Beatrice Lampariello, Simon Sadler, Anna Rosellini, Giovanni Galli, Jacopo Galimberti) intended to place UFO’s work in the context of the avant-garde that influenced its work, from the experience of Florentine Radical Architecture to Umberto Eco’s theories on semiotics and the American experiences between Pop Art, Video Art and Happening; 3) Legacy, articulated through graphic contribution and essays by young designers, as False Mirror Office, Parasite 2.0, Point Supreme, Jimenez Lai, Andrew Kovacs, Adam Nathaniel Furman, Traumnovelle, (ab)Normal and Peter Behrbohm, to investigate UFO’s legacy relative to the contemporary revival of the most distinguishing creative processes and obsessions that shaped the so-called Radical Architecture. 

Contributions by: Beatrice Lampariello, Boris Hamzeian and Andrea Anselmo (False Mirror Office), Gloria Castellini (False Mirror Office), Simon Sadler, Anna Rosellini, Giovanni Galli, Jacopo Galimberti, Filippo Fanciotti and Giovanni Glorialanza (False Mirror Office), Parasite 2.0, Point Supreme, Jimenez Lai (Bureau Spectacular), Andrew Kovacs, Adam Nathaniel Furman, Traumnovelle, (ab)Normal, Peter Behrbohm

Sujets

• Architecture

Informations

• Publié par: Actar D
• Date de parution: 18 octobre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781638408055
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 149 Mo

Extrait

UFO



UFO’s experiments between political activism and the artistic avant-garde


Unidentified Flying Object


for contemporary architecture :





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Beyond the Rejection of Explanation
Beatrice Lampariello, False Mirror Office (Andrea Anselmo, Boris Hamzeian)
1. HISTORY
UFO and the Dissolution of Architecture: from the Production of Handmade Pieces to Behavioural Actions
False Mirror Office (Andrea Anselmo, Boris Hamzeian)
2. CONTEXT
1963-1973, Ten Years That Did Not Change the World (Or Did They?)
Giovanni Galli
Born in the Occupied Universities: the Politics of Archizoom, Superstudio and UFO
Jacopo Galimberti
Street, Party, Journey, Retreat: UFO’s Constructed Situations, 1968-1975
Simon Sadler
Beyond Disciplinary Boundaries: UFO and the Artistic Avant-gardes of the Sixties and Seventies
Alessandra Acocella
Outlines of an Urbanism of Opposition: Terrorism and Liberation of the City According to UFO
Beatrice Lampariello
3. HERITAGE
The Voice of the City
Point Supreme


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Table of Contents



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The Radical Sensuality of Colour
Adam Nathaniel Furman
Welcome to UFOland!
False Mirror Office (Filippo Fanciotti, Giovanni Glorialanza)
Five Practice Points
Andrew Kovacs
Alles Ist Fiktion
Traumnovelle
Zoom of a Zoom of a Zoom
Jimenez Lai
A.N.–A.N.A.S.
Peter Behrbohm and SONDER
Scale, Displace, Replicate
(ab)Normal
Carpets as Environments
Parasite 2.0
4. ANTHOLOGY
Anthology, 1968-1978
Edited by Beatrice Lampariello and False Mirror Office (Gloria Castellini, Andrea Anselmo, and Boris Hamzeian)
1. Florence Faculty of Architecture—85 Days of Occupation
2. A Difficult Selection (Proposal for the Competition for the Staging of the Italian
Section at the 14 th Milan Triennale)
3. The Restoration of the User
4. Urbanistic Ephemeron on a Scale of 1:1
5. Attractive Urboeffimeri 1:1


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Table of Contents


6. Chicken Circus Circulation, or, Happenvironment, or, Superurbeffimero no. 7
7. Architetti Tzigani
8. Manifest of the Discontinous
9. A Letter from the UFOs to Domus
10. Album of Prophecies
11. Paramount
12. UFO
13. Elements of Territorial Proxemics: Questionnaire
14. The Giro d’Italia
15. The UFO’s Provocation
16. Coccoina
17. Non-design. From the Object to Survival
18. UFO’s Response to in ’s Questionnaire on the Problems of the Faculty of Architecture
19. Bureaucracy Architecture
20. A Four-way Conversation on Global Tools
21. Industrial Production and Individual Creativity
22. Books (Review: Umberto Eco, Segno )
23. UFOs Read (Review: John A. Walker, Glossary of Art Architecture and Design Since 1945 )
24. Control, Colonisation, and Fascism in the Territory
25. Global Tools—“Theory” Group
26. Books (Review: Paola Navone and Bruno Orlandoni, Architettura “radicale”.
La neoavanguardia italiana dell’architettura e del design dal 1960 ad oggi )
27. Notes for a Redefinition of the Concept of Fantaurbanistica
28. ID Monster
29. The Historical Object Reproducible ad Infinitum
30. UFO. Discontinuity and Territory
31. Zona Film
32. Radical Architecture is Dead: Long Live Radical Architecture
33. Books (Review: Bruno Orlandoni and Giorgio Vallino, Dalla città al cucchiaio )
34. It’s Time for Architecture
35. UFO (Performance Aboard a Boat by UFO-Mino Vismara—Violin)
Bibliography
Biographical notes
Credits


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Beyond the Rejection of Explanation
Beatrice Lampariello, False Mirror Office (Andrea Anselmo, Boris Hamzeian)



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Beyond the Rejection of Explanation


UFO. Under this short and expressive name, a group of students from the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Florence (Carlo Bachi, Lapo Binazzi, Patrizia Cammeo, Riccardo Foresi, and Titti Maschietto, accompanied at the outset by Sandro Gioli) began to discuss and collaborate at the end of 1967, producing works that they wanted to appear obscure in their origin, in their content, and in their aims. They even wanted them to remain “un- identified” in order to establish a complete coincidence between the group’s name and its work or, to use the semiological terms of which UFO was so fond, between “signifier, signified, and referent.” 1 At a distance of almost sixty years and after a limited number of studies, 2 this book, accompanied by an exhibition at the FRAC Centre-Val de Loire (Orléans, France), 3 explores the twists and turns in the story of UFO, examining letters, notes, published essays, and photographs in an attempt to uncover the creative intentions of the group. The aim of the book, therefore, is to surmount the barrier that UFO itself had erected between its work and its interpretation through a “rejection of explanation,” 4 in order to keep it “unidenti- fied,” so as to provide, for the first time, a critical reading of UFO’s entire body of work. Thus in going beyond that “rejection,” the book has assumed the position of the “gate-crasher” in the film The Swimmer (1968), 5 which the group had adopted as a symbol in order to explore territories to which entry has been “forbidden” up until now. 6 And just as UFO had upset the established rhythms of the city and the holding of exhibitions with the aim of liber- ating architecture—and thus human beings—from any limitation, from the dimensional constraints of function, from the power of technology, and from any kind of construction that sought to last forever in order to bring architecture back to its essence of “pure creativity” 7 —and human beings to the condition of “operators/us- ers” 8 —the book sets out to provide historians, theorists, architects, and designers with new fields of inquiry. The picture that emerges from it is a complex one, with multiple references ranging from art to semiotics and from politics to the Carnival. It sketches the out- lines of an architecture that aimed at its “de-architecturization” 9 in rejection of the figure of the demiurge in favour of a community


1 See, among others, Umberto Eco, Appunti per una semiologia delle comunicazioni visive (Milan: Bompiani, 1967).
2 Among them it is worth citing the exhibition held at the Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci (Prato) from 29 September 2012 to 24 February 2013 and its catalogue: Stefano Pezzato (ed.), Ufo story: dall’architettura radicale al design globale (Prato: Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, 2012). See too Amit Wolf, ‘Superurbeffimero no. 7: Umberto Eco’s Semiologia and the Architectural Rituals of the U.F.O.’, California Italian Studies , no. 2, 2011; Alessandra Acocella, ‘Scenografie radicali. San Giovanni Valdarno 1968’, in Acocella, Avanguardia diffusa. Luoghi di sperimentazione artistica in Italia 1967-1970 (Milan: Fondazione Passaré/Macerata: Quodlibet, 2016), pp. 73-94; Agata Knapik, ‘Radykalne projekty grupy UFO jako przyklad architektury narracyjnej’, Quart: Kwartalnik Ins- tytutu Historii Sztuki Uniwersytetu Wroclawskiego , no. 2, 2018, pp. 88- 106; and False Mirror Office (Andrea Anselmo and Boris Hamzeian), ‘L’as- semblaggio come testo figurativo per l’architettura. Un dialogo tra UFO e False Mirror Office’, PianoB , no. 2, 2019, pp. 88-118.
3 The exhibition, entitled Uniden- tified Flying Object (UFO), perfor- mer l’architecture and curated by Beatrice Lampariello, Andrea Anselmo and Boris Hamzeian (False Mirror Office) and Nabila Metaïr and Abdelkader Damani (FRAC Centre-Val de Loire), was held from 15 April 2022 to 15 January 2023.
4 Lapo Binazzi (UFO), Ufo. Discon- tinuità e territorio (Milan: Centro internazionale di Brera, 1977).



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of “operators/users”; of industrial production in favour of a process of construction that was a theatre of life; of building materials in favour of polyethylene, polyurethane, and papier-mâché; and finally of buildings in favour of happenings that were intended to provide environments to stimulate people’s fantasy and imagina- tion. In stripping itself of all those characteristics that it has been laden with over the centuries, architecture as understood by UFO was also set free of its original connotation of providing shelter for human beings and became a message to be delivered in squares, in streets, in shops, and in the countryside. In this approach, entail- ing a progressive destruction of the work, the object, and the city, 10 UFO seems to fall into line with Superstudio, Archizoom, and 9999. Despite their common position of rejection, however, it is possible to identify substantial differences between the exponents of the so-called Radical Architecture. What UFO set out to destroy was the very concept of the project as it had become entrenched in the 20 th century, that of a pr