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When he can sum up everything in a sentence like that, you wonder why Mr. West ever bothered to write the remaining 220 pages of his 1968 History of Architecture in Italy. Perhaps he was just looking for an excuse to display his drawings and photographs of remarkable Renaissance churches. Or perhaps he felt the need to account for those times when the basic artistic instincts of the Italian people have seemed somehow suppressed. In 1914, for example, Antonio Sant’Elia famously heralded the emergence of Futurist architecture by complaining that to all intents and purposes there had been no architecture in Italy since the eighteenth century. And there have been plenty of moments in more recent times when, in terms of significant artistic production, things have seemed eerily quiet on the Italian front.
Of course historians like West are generally far too unflappable to let that kind of talk blow a rather large hole through a perfectly good theory. When it comes to Sant’Elia and his ilk, West advises, we should all remember that people who write manifestos are notoriously prone to exaggeration. As far as West is concerned, the function of cultural history is to steamroll over any peaks and troughs in order to produce a flattened narrative that reduces every action to the mean. Life is simpler that way and that’s why his stereotype persists to this day.





Yet during the wind up (and that’s so often what it is) to yet another Venice Biennale, there appeared to be signs that when it comes to Italy people like West may no longer have things all their own way. At this year’s festival, a young architectural collective called Gruppo A12 have been commissioned to design The Zone, which the organisers portentously describe as a space in which to ‘test a new image of Italian art’. They also add that A12’s architecture provides a metaphor for the role that Italy and its art have played in European history, which sounds like a millstone designed to drag down even the strongest of necks.

Yet the promise of a new image always sounds exciting. Although given that ‘Italian art’ is represented by the work of only five artists, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this attempt at novelty is simply another of those exaggerations that West warned you about. In fact, probable exaggeration is the least of your worries. Ask A12 about The Zone and they’ll tell you that they are not interested in seeing their work in terms of metaphors. Ask them what they think about the Italian art scene and they’ll reply that they don’t even believe that it exists.

A12 was formed in 1993 by twelve architecture students who worked in a shared space in Genoa that they dubbed ‘stanzone’ (big room). Like their more famous contemporaries Stalker, and other groups of young Italian architects, they describe a world in which going to parties, meeting friends, getting drunk and having fun is just as important to their development as winning architecture competitions (A12 won the prestigious ‘Europan’ competition in 1999) and showing their work at biennials. So while they may not believe in the existence of an organised Italian art scene, the group’s very foundation lies in the social scene that developed out of a very large room.

These days, A12’s membership is reduced to seven and, with that big room now long gone, it is distributed across even larger distances – Genoa, Milan and Santiago, Chile. In keeping with themes of bigness and internationalism, the group describe their work as being about architecture in a broad sense, ‘as William Morris considered it at the end of the nineteenth century: every activity devoted to the modification of the environment.’ So much for all that Biennale hype about being new and Italian. Yet the Biennale curators can still be reassured by the comforting fact that architecture in the ‘broad’ sense is now the height of cool. Of course anyone familiar with work produced by the kind of currently cool people – architects like Diller + Scofidio or artists like Liam Gillick – who squat on the ‘broadly architectural’ boundary between art and architecture will probably know that all this is generally an excuse for architects to exorcise their pretensions and for artists to feel useful.

When it comes to explaining their rather mysterious name, which A12 adopted only in 1995, the group glibly declare that it was simply a ‘random’ choice. It was the result of a practical necessity, they add, because having a name makes it easier to deal with the art and architecture institutions in which they show their work. But they also admit that the ‘A’ could stand for architecture and that the reference to the A12 motorway, which goes east out of Genoa, allowed for a cheeky, if somewhat obscure, identification with the granddaddy of modern architecture, Le Corbusier, and his famous (in the very limited sense of fame among architects) book Voyage en Orient. It seems at times to be a confusing etymology, but it does describe the strange mix that characterises A12’s work: an irreverent attitude to institutionalised culture, a subtle consciousness of history, and a very contemporary pragmatism. In everyday terms this means that they wouldn’t say no to a pair of discounted Prada shoes, but they couldn’t give a damn about exhibiting in Prada’s fashionable Milan exhibition space.

Perhaps I’ve got Prada on the brain because every architect I meet seems to wear it and because during the last few months Miuccia Prada has been telling the art world about how difficult it is for people to find an identity in our complex contemporary society. Apparently Miuccia is one of the 30 most powerful women in the world; she runs a very profitable fashion empire and a very big art foundation. But if she had read almost any popular magazine she would know that thanks to her and her colleagues identity is still a very simple issue today. It is merely a matter of what you choose: watches by Bulgari, sunglasses by Ferre, pink boots by Versace, perhaps some orange gloves by Miu Miu, and a wardrobe full of Prada suits.

Last year, when it came to creating a project for Genoa’s Pinksummer gallery, A12 selected cinemas as a vehicle through which to present an urban identity. It seems perversely random, but perhaps it’s really no different to choosing to wear Prada rather than Armani, or T.W. West choosing to write about Renaissance churches rather than brothels. So A12’s exhibition 12.11.72 compared the number of cinemas in the town at that date (85) to the equivalent figure 30 years later (49 screens in 24 cinemas). Behind the numbers, the group traced a narrative of urban, economic and social change that lay behind the transformation of the 85 original sites. The end result presents a rather different tale to the static postcard image of the downtown tourist area with which someone like West is familiar.

A12’s best-known project (a collaboration with Udo Noll and Peter Scupelli) is the web-based database Parole (Words), and it plays with similar ideas on a grander scale. Essentially a database of modern ideas about urbanism, Parole maps the city from A (‘abandoned doorsteps’ and ‘accidental cities’) to Z (‘zoom towns’ and ‘zribas’). In between there are around 900 word definitions and 1,000 links that the user can explore in more or less random ways. Log in and you experience an eclectic, multilingual city chatter presented in every form, from commentary and quotation to videos and webcams. And like any contemporary city, Parole is home to an ever-growing community, a social network held in place by an architecture of hyperlinks and mailing lists. William Gibson would be proud. But crucially, as is almost never the case in most contemporary cities, Parole is home to an active community. The city fabric is constantly reshaped by those who pass through it as they add new phrases and refine definitions.

In keeping with that spirit, Parole is also an attempt to provide an alternative to the closed system that defines the traditional archive. As a way of demonstrating this, when Parole was exhibited at New York’s P.S.1 in 2001, A12 invited strangers to use the gallery space as a stage on which to present their work, realise performances and give lectures. ‘In general, we always try to produce spaces that are liveable, inhabitable and open to more than one meaning and interpretation,’ they say.
Antonio Sant’Elia died before he had a chance to build anything, and that’s a tradition many Italian architects have followed. In the 1970s, when A12 were just kids, groups like Superstudio and Archizoom were busily attacking traditional notions of architecture by producing unbuildable utopian projects presented as collages, manifestos and cartoons. And their colourful work, termed architettura radicale, was turned into a very exportable cultural product by art historians like Germano Celant. Currently displayed in galleries across the world – from New York’s MoMA to London’s Design Museum – that work is enjoying something of a Renaissance today. But as far as A12 are concerned, the best thing about it is that it helped divert its protagonists’ energies away from constructing ‘real architectural projects with terrible results’. When the so-called radical architects did go on to build things they were ‘horrible, postmodernist, extremely commercial, and conventional things’. It’s a fate that A12 hope to avoid by resisting commercial pressures and by continuing to work with friends and cultural institutions that are genuinely interested in their work. And while that work may sometimes seem no more architecturally real than a manifesto or a collage, A12 maintain a commitment to judging it by its real results. There are currently 700 subscribers to the Parole mailing list.

They recognise the Biennale as a platform for fame – ‘we hope some rich Texan art lover will fall in love with our work and commission us to design his or her new villa in Baghdad,’ they joke – but they would be happy for their work to continue as it is. In keeping with that, their design for Venice will be a relatively simple one: a box-like ‘shelter’ for the artwork (because by the sound of it the art needs one) and ‘an open space where people can meet and rest’ (because everyone is going to need a rest after they have seen the art).

The Austrian writer Robert Musil once said that ‘we overestimate the importance of knowing where we are because in nomadic times it was essential to recognise the tribal feeding grounds’. In Rome, construction of the MAXXI (Museum of Art for the XXIst Century), a new oasis for modern art designed by Zaha Hadid, is already underway. It will cost £40 million and be completed by 2005. But perhaps it’s in the less expensive work of groups like A12, operating in the cultural desert beyond such institutions, that you’ll find the real future of Italian art. People like T.W. West may not like it but Francesco Bonami and his team of Biennale curators will have their fingers crossed at any rate.

Mark Rappolt is the Architecture Editor for contemporary

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