From Realism to Reality

The text is a critical reading of contemporary italian architecture focusing on the issue of realism. During the first half of the 1990’s, in fact, a particular form of realism animates Italian architectural research and coincides with the idea of returning to an interest in Italy and its architecture. It is a realism activated in large measure by the profound shock caused by the events of Tangentopoli - the political shakedown - and its initial results, which demonstrate the true essence of the “architecture of the city”: a territory built, in large part, from the dense weaving of dangerous liaisons between government bodies, businessmen and architects that is reflected in a post-urban landscape that is as widespread as it is indifferent to cultured architecture and politics. However, while the more institutional criticism attempts to focus in on the “Italian anomaly” by placing it within the framework of a weak and ineffective tradition of modernity, it is precisely during this period that a few architects from the younger generation begin to look at this context as the dramatic and inexorable, though extraordinarily vital scenario which offers the possibility to start over in order to awaken architecture from the torpor into which it has fallen after the last heroic gestures of the 1970’s . The book is based on an exhibit/symposium held at Cornell University, Ithaca and New York City, about contemporary Italian architecture. to which Mastrigli took part. The book is edited by Alberto Alessi with a foreword by Mohsen Mostafavi.