New Italian Architecture: 5 Steps For A Common Language

By Luigi Prestinenza Puglisi - 3 March 2010

Who are the young architects? One might say those still under thirty-five, or at most forty. Old enough once upon a time to have received outstanding commissions. Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers and Jørn Utzon are examples. But the answer is not that simple.

Owing to the present dearth of professional opportunities, one can call even the over-40s young architects. So it would seem if we look at the Casabella yearbook devoted to new ideas: it pushes the threshold up to fifty, though obviously removing any generational reference from the front cover. Thirty-five, forty or fifty? It could be an idle question, and in many respects it is. But as with most idle questions, there is an intriguing problem behind it: whether common attitudes distinguish some age brackets from others.

To my mind such distinctions do exist. Though of course they need taking with a pinch of common sense of the kind that enables historians to realize the arbitrariness of dividing two eras by a key factor or classifying an author under a stylistic generalization according to his date of birth or publication.

With this caution in mind we might claim that the present generation of forty-fifty year-olds has managed to extricate Italian architecture from the doldrums of post-modernism and its Italian version, Trend, and to drag it kicking, hesitating and back-tracking into the mainstream of European architecture: take such different practices as Boeri, Cucinella, Archea, 5+1AA, Zucchi, Ian+.

It did enjoy the advantages of the post-tangentopoli climate when many administrations - like municipalities in the north-east and north-west - felt an urge to start afresh and hence put their trust in the young. This played into the hands of the most skilful/uninhibited at using competition strategy. They were helped by a new generation of critics who used them as a means of getting architecture in Italy to turn over a new leaf. But it was also these...