MARTIN FEIERSINGER
Detours
1960s Architecture: Italy
Ten Modern Buildings Revisited
German/English, 64 pages with 34 colour illustrations, 15 x 19 cm, paperback
ISBN 978-3-85160-116-9
€ 15,00 [A]
€ 14,60 [D]
DETOURS focuses on architecture of the recent past, on nineteen-sixties
buildings. During this decade—a period in which the most crucial
postwar reconstruction work had been completed—architects sought
to develop a fitting expression of the vibrant economic and cultural scenes.
This study zeroes in on a specific region: northern Italy, where the approach
to creating architectural form spawned a considerable number of idiosyncratic
and distinctive buildings. It takes a fresh look at the legacy of modernism
and documents buildings in their present condition. The title designates
both a work process (a discursive viewing of paradigmatic buildings) and
a way of traveling (on roundabout paths off the beaten track of modernism).
The buildings mirror a wide range of nineteen-sixties themes and concepts.
Their common denominator, however, is the general tendency to turn away
from orthodox modernism. With the designs for these ten projects the architects—unfazed
by the insistence on formal and structural clarity typical of academic
circles—embrace ambiguity, or, in other words, seek to create manifestations
of formal and structural complexity.