Alessandro Bava - Habitable Art

Mar 29, 2018 809

After World War II, the view of Milan from Monte Stella—the artificial hill made out of rubble from the allied bombing designed by and dedicated to the wife of Piero Bottoni—was quite sad. These were the years of the ricostruzione, the material and metaphorical reconstruction of Italy after fascism; the opportunity to hurry Italy into the future, into industrialization, into the modernity that the Americans dropped along with the bombs.

Meanwhile in Brianza, the territory just outside of Milan where Saint Augustine experienced his conversion, factories, artisanal workshops, and productions lines were slowly starting again, getting ready for, and excited by the promises of the Marshall Plan. A sense of euphoria came from the emptiness of loss, the erasure of a sedimented past. The harsh tabula rasa of Italian post war cities arguably spun a psychological urge to reconstruct, triggering that essential human ability of imagining, projecting, and making habitable. 

Read more

SOURCE: http://www.e-flux.com

You may be interested