Allocutio per la Laurea Honoris Causa ad Andrea Branzi
Lucio Valerio Barbera
Coincidences. Sometimes the grey chronicle in which we record the laboured progress of our undertakings appears written by a prophetic pen which smiles at - or mocks? – our efforts, yet also rewards us, unexpectedly revealing in unforeseen coincidence the favour of the Gods, a fleeting sign of assent to our actions. The day before yesterday, May the 14th 2008, the Sapienza University Assessment Nucleus approved the plan of this architecture faculty to germinate a new design faculty, the Faculty of Industrial Design as some of us prefer to call it. Yesterday, the 15th of May 2008, the Academic Council of the Federated Academy of Humanistic Sciences, Arts and the Environment, of which our faculty of architecture is part, approved the same project – unanimously and to hearty applause. Today, the 16th of May 2008, our architecture faculty, which carries the name of Ludovico Quaroni, offers the Laurea Honoris Causa in Industrial Design to Andrea Branzi, a Florentine who was Ludovico Quaroni’s student in Florence at the beginning of the sixties. A sequence which only the able direction of the occult wills of Olympus could have mounted, unbeknownst to us all with such perfection.
Coincidences. Thanks to the casual coincidence of the convoluted outcomes of splendid academic careers caught on the wing by the long-sightedness of a memorable president, between the fifties and the sixties the Florence architecture faculty was certainly the greatest Italian centre of new thought about architecture and the city: Savioli, Libera, Quaroni and Benevolo, to name only the greatest or best known, for some years in Florence affirmed in their teaching and in the mixture of their diverse personalities, the necessity that the new architect be a critical and creative intellectual who understood the positive value of ambiguity and human imperfection, who based his certainties upon doubt and his future visions upon history, his language upon the elegance of naked construction quantity and the ripping up of the borders between architecture and art, thus dilating the territory of his actions to such a point as to bring to this ripping the strict, classical, humanist conception of architecture as unitary form of existence. This was the faculty which Andrea Branzi, student, frequented.
Coincidences. In 1963 Ludovico Quaroni, while still a professor at Florence, launched with Giancarlo De Carlo the City Planning seminar of Arezzo, the first in vitro attempt to define the autonomous field of the metropolitan and urban dimension of architecture, breaking off from the body of traditional academic studies that conceptual sphere whence to explore, develop and teach, with a new and necessary freedom of thought and instrumentation, the role, sense and final destiny of the plan of the modern city. In 1963, the memorable exhibition of Le Corbusier’s works also opened at Palazzo Strozzi. For the best youth of the time, already gathered in groups which made up on one hand the Superstudio, and on the other the Archizoom which included Andrea Branzi, the meeting with the works of the greatest European master of modernity – organised and brought to Florence by Savioli, one of their teachers – was decisive, as scholars of modernity note, almost as though they drew from that encounter the energy necessary for their future conceptual utopias. I constantly promise myself that I will ask Andrea Branzi directly how much the vast and theoretically infinite chessboard of Chandigarth, planned by Le Corbusier, contributed to confirming in his group, just formed at the time, the possibility of working on the planning of the unconfined, quantitative and dilated vision of their future Endless City, the No-Stop City, milestone for any reflection upon the modern metropolis. Coincidentally, 1963 was also the year in which the fantastic group of teachers in Florence broke up. Libera and Quaroni followed one another rapidly to the Architecture Faculty of Rome. Benevolo followed them soon after. In the second part of the sixties, Andrea Branzi and his young group began to fly alone, led by the hand for the first short stretch by Professor Klaus Koenig, an unforgettable historian and himself a late flowering of that extraordinary and unrepeatable Florentine season. It was therefore no coincidence that Quaroni, shortly after his return to Florence, involved his Roman assistants in his most utopian and conceptual project, the continuous linear city between Roma and Florence, laid out so as to cover the Valley of the Tevere and the Paglia, Val di Chiana and the Casentino, a gigantic and undefined continuum, a real No-Stop City, a landscape within the landscape where, as Andrea Branzi would put it, form no longer corresponds to the activities carried out within, but to the life of a fluid society, immersed in an elastic democracy, without ideologies to represent, rich in environmental and material components, mobile and interchangeable. A city in which the precious and stable role which was that of architecture dissolves in the volatile, exciting and temporary aesthetic of objects of use: objects of Design, as we would say today. I regret no longer being able to ask Quaroni directly, this time, how much the utopian fervour and the thinking of his Florentine students, which included Andrea Branzi, contributed to confirming or actually forming in his mind the dilated, infinite vision of the city laid out almost symbolically between Rome and Florence like a huge caiman – as we christened it at the time – his No-Stop City.
For all of this and for his value, but also to make the creative ambiguity of the meanings and roles of Architecture and Design explicit and communicable, but perhaps above all to make all aware of the happiness with which we architects see such diverse modernity generated from our own ancient culture, we are honoured and moved to be able to thank Andrea Branzi for giving us the possibility to count him as certainly one of the best of Ludovico Quaroni’s students.
One last coincidence. A few years ago, a student of the Technical University of Delft, Martin van Schaik, with a group of his colleagues, ran across - in Franciska Bollerei’s words –the greyness of the vacuum of teaching of Architecture in Delft. In their search for an alternative they returned to history and, with the professors of the Institute for the History of Art, Architecture and Urbanism, gave the impulse to a seminar aimed at taking up the study of the thought and plans of the revolutionary architects of the nineteen sixties. The fruits of the seminar were published in 2005: among them stood out, naturally, the great value attributed to the conception and vision of Andrea Branzi and his group, his untiring exploration of the diverse yet interwoven territories of the metropolis and the – quantitative – industrial production of components of use and aesthetic value. Unfortunately, to the great dismay of the entire world of architecture, on the 14th of May 2008, the day before yesterday, while the approval for the new faculty of Design was on its way here, the Architecture Faculty of the University of Delft, where the need for new reflection upon the modern utopia began, burned to the ground, from its roof to its foundations. Fortunately nobody was harmed. A tremendous drama for the entire architectural culture; along with the building designed by Bakema, all the plans of the Dutch masters of modernity and their priceless library were destroyed. All the Italian Architecture faculties are united in a message of solidarity and concrete assistance, and I have made myself the bearer of this commitment. But from every happening, in this unexpected time of coincidences, it seems we must smilingly draw an auspice and prophetic direction. And I cannot help but be struck by the fact that the students and the professors of Architecture in Delft, in order to continue their tragically interrupted work, have been welcomed into the nearby Faculty of Design. As always, symbols, like the sayings of the Sibyl, can be ambivalently interpreted: is this, then, the precognition of the future, definitive dissolution of Architecture in Design, or rather the peremptory indication to we architects that we must draw decisively – in favour of Architecture – sustenance and method and vision of the future from that which is developed – and which will also be developed for us – in the rooms of the Faculty of Design?
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