Torino’s 2013 Architecture Festival by Fondazione OAT

A common trait, among many great Italian architects of the XX Century, was the capacity of combining the dimension of thinking with that of designing. If it is true, as Aldo Rossi maintained, that architecture produces and expresses its thinking through the combination of its multiform expressions – texts, drawings and buildings –, it is also true that nowadays in Italy, at least in the majority of cases, architectural drawing is reduced to a sterile and homologating practice (has anyone noticed that the renders of the proposals for the Expo 2015 Italian Pavilion all look the same?), while architecture texts rarely go beyond the useless condition of background noise (a tendency strictly connected with the rapid growth of a “hit and run” kind of publishing, privileging the fast consumption of photographic images over the slow sedimentation of contents normally demanded by critical writing). As a result, a relevant part of today’s Italian architecture seems only capable of recycling, without understanding them, forms and images that are usually developed abroad: a design strategy that has turned out to be quite adequate to the – now collapsed – market of the last decade, but that hasn’t helped the development of original research lines on Italian ground..

Once observed in this context, the work of Beniamino Servino establishes a pleasant exception. Born in 1960, the architect from Caserta is one of the best “hedgehogs” around, recalling Isaiah Berlin’s famous definition (also mentioned by Colin Rowe in Collage City) according to which, unlike foxes who “know many things”, hedgehogs “know one big thing”, meaning that they “refer everything to a central vision, a more or less coherent and articulated system, provided with rules that help them understand, think and feel – an inspiring principle, unique and universal, which is the only one that can give a meaning to everything they say and are”.

In Servino’s case, such inspiring principle seems to be entirely contained in the title of the lecture that Zeroundicipiù has invited him to give next Saturday, in the occasion of Torino’s 2013 Architecture Festival, “Monumental need in the landscape of abandonment”: a four-words mantra, containing the main coordinates of a poetic research that explores the ambiguous mental territory defined by the collision of construction and representation, reality and utopia – a territory across which have wandered, or still wander, authors such as Piranesi, Rossi, Hejduk, Scolari and Brodsky. A research born during the Eighties among the abandoned warehouses of the casertan fields – the famous “pennate”  –, that today invests critically, by means of texts, drawings and buildings, some troublesome but crucial themes of contemporary architectural discourse:

To abandon. To leave without a help or protection, to leave to its own weaknesses. Stop taking care of something. The landscape wants [wants!] to be abandoned [no more golf fields, never again!].

Davide Tommaso Ferrando

Organization.- Fondazione OAT.
Location.- Castelfidardo Str. 22, Torino, Italia.
Venue.- Sala Duomo, Officine Grandi Riparazioni.
Date.- 1st. June 2013. Hour.- 18:00.