Journal

Versione Italiana

I think that 5+1AA’s work is the most interesting being done in Italian architecture today. Just recently, the agency has initiated a number projects ‘along the border’ which are now being developed and are on the verge of completion. (I expect that sooner or later that evanescent quality will ineffably slide away disappear from the horizon) Yet the beauty of this work is that it is constantly redefining horizons in a creative world that is multifarious and ever-transforming. For example, their New Exhibition Centre is taking shape on the boundary between Milan and what is no longer Milan; the ex-cinema Embassy has been given a new function with the combined use of opaque materials and transparent elements; the MOdAM is suspended between preservation and re-creation. In the same way, the slender Landmark Tower can be seen from east to west, rising up over the flag from north to south; Palazzo dei Frigoriferi_Frigoriferi Milanesi is introverted, poised between its own colourful structure and the throbbing city; the low Emission Building in Vado is lit up by falling and reflected lights which seem to come from some mysterious source, transporting us to the magical-realism and bare prose of the’20s, 30’s, 40’s and even 50’s. And so on. In this western country, which extends as a bridge from north to south, saturated with architecture, cities and landscapes, but still lacking effective technological networks of communication, as well as places and buildings that truly invite habitation, the question is whether these projects succeed in expressing and responding to the logic and sensibility of what is now urgent contemporary research. Or rather, should we return to the lessons of Europe’s experimental 20th century poetry, which attempted to depersonalize and reify architecture, and treated ‘logic’ and ‘sensibility’ as objective correlatives?
I think we should.
It is not surprising that, for the exhibition at Whitecross Gallery, 5+1AA has commissioned terracotta miniatures of its work. Nor is it surprising that these objects, these “objective correlatives”, have also been shifted to the horizon, into the subtle chaos of things (which is to say that on the whole 5+1AA’s poetics don’t actually appear very chaotic!). They could be washed up on a beach, recalling cuttlebones – the organic elements used as metaphors by the Ligurian poet Eugenio Montale, champion of laconic 20th century expression, in his 1925 work Ossi di Seppia. Instead we find them at the Whitecross Gallery exhibition, forming a kind of manifesto for the magic realism that will always inspire 5+1AA. They could be things abandoned in the terrain vague, wonderful, porous bits of scrap. Yet here they are displayed and represented. These are extraordinary photographic works (see Walker Evans’ immortal photograph entitled Farmer’s Kitchen), they generate new icons. In turn these icons, or these iconic correlatives, comprise the catalogue of the London exhibition, and also the album related to the infolio, by Edoardo Persico (an amazing document contained in an issue of “Domus” entitled Arte Romana, dating back to 1935, where the photographs of the Augustan sculptures were at the centre of new trends, in line with the “spirit of now”).

Vittorio Savi