A letter to Unit+ architects now in residency at San Settimio to re-enact the possible utopia once called Operazione Arcevia

 

Dear Unit+,

 

it was a pleasure meeting you at the Riserva Privata San Settimio, and experiencing the making of your new project, the “Camera Obscura”. We are sure that it will be a success and that the lucky visitors of this observatory for looking at clouds will effectively grasp the energy that you and your supporters are giving to re-enact Operazione Arcevia Comunità Esistenziale.

 

It may help you to know that when the real estate developer Italo Bartoletti asked architect Ico Parisi to conceive a new village to be built on the top of the hill behind Palazzo d’Arcevia – exactly where you are working these days – Italy was a very different country from what it has become during the “media” dictatorship. It was the end of 1971 and one of the main social problems in Italy was the depopulation of the countryside due to the economic boom occurred after the Second World War. Just to give you some numbers, between 1951 and 1961 more that two million of people moved from the rural south to the big industrial cities. In that period Milan’s population increased up to 25%, Rome to 30% and Turin to 43%.

 

Also in this country, violence was one of the main consequences. According to official data 271 terroristic attacks using dynamite took place in 1972 in Italy, 287 in 1977. Was that enough to make a real estate developer thinking about a new kind of rural town involving art critics, psychologists, artists, poets, film makers, composers? Yes, it was, also considering that Italy at that time was still an emerging country with a Pil growing around 3,5 % per year, and an inflation rate between 15% and 18%.

 

It is also to be said that, thanks to politicians like Giovanni Spadolini, at the end of the 1960s Italy started to invest, with a long term strategy, in its cultural heritage. After the Summer of Love many influential people thought that culture was the best way to face the social crisis. In 1969 the so called “Commissione Franceschini”, promoted by the government, asserted that “every material evidence proving civilization” was to be considered as part of the cultural heritage, and hence to be protected.

 

A specific “Ministero dei Beni Culturali” was founded in 1972 to manage the cultural heritage, and the art historian Giulio Carlo Argan was elected major of Rome in 1971. The first Istituto dei Beni Culturali was founded in 1974 in Emilia Romagna thanks to art historian Andrea Emiliani (you ought to read his “Per una politica dei beni culturali”, 1971!) to provide politicians with reliable and precise information regarding the cultural heritage they had to regulate.

 

The movement of the “participated architecture” was part of this scenery too, that was a new way of planning buildings, involving their future inhabitants. Look at the cases of the “Quartiere Corviale” in Roma, the “Zen” in Palermo, or “Gibellina Nuova” in the Valle del Belice, Sicily, and the works of architects such as Vittorio Gregotti, Giancarlo De Carlo or Paolo Soleri.

 

As you already know, despite the great effort made by Bartoletti and Parisi – helped by two extraordinary art critics such as Enrico Crispolti and Pierre Restany – the Arcevia’s “Comunità Esistenziale” (Existentialist Community) has never become real. The village with the streets named by the poet Tonino Guerra, the parking area where films especially conceived by Michelangelo Antonioni for this place were to be projected, or the stairs playing a different sound at each step, today lives only in the documentation left of the projecting process, that is to say photos, drawings, recordings and a couple of books. But as you have probably experienced, the architecture made of ideas can last even longer than the one made in reinforced concrete. What really makes the difference in the end is the quality of the ingredients.

 

Enjoy your work!

Yours sincerely

Conceptual Fine Arts

September 22, 2014