California Italian Studies

In the years starting just after WWII up to the nineteen seventies, a sizable group of italian architects, artists, and photographers create a vast amount of graphic, pictorial and photographic images documenting vague or broken traditions, illustrating places of the spirit, indicating emotional geographies, and selecting territories, settlements, artifacts, simple objects and archeological finds that all together could form the material for a generational album.

The architect’s interest is not completely coincident with that of an artist or a photographer, who, driven by the desire of being a witness to the changes and promises of those years, is continually exploring the outskirts of the cities and the small inland hamlets. The architect’s concern with traditions of day to day living and building that date back to ancient times, the attraction they feel toward indigenous or informal local architecture, and the generally accepted opinion that the built environment should reflect the history, culture, and climate of that community not only stem from a deep criticism of the Modern Movement but are also a reaction against mass civilization, a refuge from the socio-economic reality of industrialization.

Separated from the productive world, architectural culture can’t make decisive choices, and because of this has to keep a strong connection with its history; a history which, however, is not so much a technical and aesthetic issue or an exercise in praise of formal or “authorial” architecture, but the frame for a way of life; the interaction of culture, customs, and environment relative to a specific community. This desire for reality, this necessity for a new and direct contact with the territory, perceived as a valuable workshop for study and research, a stimulus to the use of senses and the development of creative intelligence, converges with the interests of others of the same period, namely the painters and photographers.

Their explorations of the reality don’t stem from the intent to create a history or an identity of the various local realities based upon primary facts and individuals but to get records of way of life. The result is a novel approach to archeology: representations of “minor” artifacts and utilitarian structures weathered by time, usage, and neglect. Landscapes to re-invent through the use of a new visual alphabet and a different kind of narration. Architects, artists, and photographers give themselves over to this reality creating imagery that at times may seem unorthodox and erratic but, and most importantly, is historic-archeological (from the constant drawing on the past), and even ethic-onthological (from connecting the past to the present).

At the heart of this work there’s the attempt to recognize the multiple intertwinement, the mutual restrictions and the “genetic” differences between the architectual vision developed in the socio-cultural utopies of the period , the inquiring self-reflecting artists’ iconographies and the renewal of representation on the part of photographers, especially in the sixties and seventies of the 19th century. The aim of this investigation is not to present some hidden masterpiece but to follow the change in images — graphic and pictorial works of architects, products of different visual cultures, professional thinking, sensibilities, and knowledge — and using history, explain the reasons for this change. If it is possible to recognize a common trend as to the nature and quality of the relationship between formal and informal landscapes, very different instead is the commitment  that architects on one side and artists and photographers on the other make on an aesthetic and methodical level.