But what are cities today? Powerful attractors of crowds, ideas, dynamics, yet increasingly places of alienation and extraneousness, crossed and suffocated by “non-places”gutted by perverse economic logic. They are made, quoting the immense Italo Calvino, of “desires and fears”: “Cities, like dreams, are built of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules absurd, their perspectives deceptive, and everything hides another.” To trace its golden thread, reconstruct its human dimension, reaffirm its beauty, calling together the best of contemporary creative and critical thought, there is the exhibition “La Bellezza Pergata” curated by Fernando Miglietta, promoted in Rome by the Casa of Architecture, by the Order of Architects of Rome, by the Roman Aquarium, in collaboration with the International Research Institute and the magazine Abitacolo, and the patronage of Roma Capitale, the University Sapienza University of Rome, Faculty of Architecture, the Museum of the Suburbs. From Fuksas to Boeri, from Pistoletto to Paladino and many others: a real performance of architects, artists, intellectuals with works and thoughts for a new city.
Conceived by the Miglietta Archive, the exhibition, set up in the evocative location of the monumental complex of the Roman Aquarium, open until 2 December, invites dialogue and comparison with many ways of looking at the multiple forms of the city, at its lost beauty. «Cities – writes the curator – have become the negation of living on the Earth because we have not been able to safeguard the City Value or protect them from the vandalistic incursions of a homogenizing society that has canceled every urban identity. Against the dominant disvalues – continues Miglietta – it will urgently be necessary to relaunch human and creative cities, full of memory and visions, regaining the feeling of belonging to a culture, to a thought».
Many protagonists who shared this choral project for a new city founded on the encounter between art and architecture, forms and languages, theories, imagination and project, all historical figures of art, architecture and culture. But how do the authors called upon to discuss the lost beauty of cities imagine the new city? Here are some of them: Paolo Portoghesi in his speech, «The city tomorrow», recommends that «we need to concentrate all our energies on safeguarding cities that have a history because only they can guide us to face the problems of the future»; Stefano Boeri, who proposes «Trees and architecture», reaffirms the desire to «change the city if we want it to continue to be the primary habitat for our species»; Michelangelo Pistoletto relaunches with the «Creative City, the Archipelago City»; Mimmo Paladino illuminates human centrality in an increasingly alienated world with his critical vision; Giulio Paolini relates the condition of the city to communication, of which he observes congestion; Andrea Branzi reaffirms how «The future of the city is only a philosophical thought and no longer a territorial program»; while Marcello Veneziani underlines that «it is not a question of looking for the Ideal City that is lost in the skies of Utopia but the Civitas Hominis on a historical scale that inhabits reality with the mind of myth and uses creativity to reawaken tradition».
But who are the real enemies of the concept of the city today? «The city is perceived as an almost unlivable environment because it is unknown – observes Massimiliano Fuksas – perhaps we are the real enemies of the concept of the city». And to the question «What will the new city be like», Luca Maria Patella answers with his work: «No! Better to watch two Martians having coffee in Piazza del Popolo.”
The participants
Mimmo Paladino, Massimiliano Fuksas, Marco Biraghi, Franco Purini, Marcello Veneziani, Luca Molinari, Paolo Portoghesi, Maria Luisa Priori, Stefano Boeri, Fernando Miglietta, Alberto Ferlenga, Alessandro Melis, Daniel Buren, Orazio Carpenzano, Beniamino Servino, Anthony Caradonna, Cherubino Gambardella, Laura Thermes, Mauro Castellani, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Vittorio Tolu, Sergio Miglietta, Agostino Ferrari, Armando Marrocco, Pablo Echaurren, Michele Sambin, Gian Maria Tosatti, Livio Sacchi, Serafino Maiorano, Fulvio Caldarelli, Marcello Sestito, Luca Maria Patella, Gianni Asdrubali, Margherita Petranzan, Giulio Paolini, Massimo Ilardi, Alessandro Morino, Anna Maria Terremoto, Amedeo Schiattarella, Ugo La Pietra, Andrea Branzi, Alberto Abruzzese, Giorgios Papaevangeliu, Lina Malfona, Richard England, Elena Santoro, Carmelo Strano.