On the 26th of February 2016 the project Savage Architecture — an exhibition at Architectural Association of London and a book published by Black Square both curated by Davide Sacconi — will be presented in a symposium at the Italian Cultural Institute of London. The project recounts the research at the intersection between architecture and anthropology developed in the last fifty years by Gian Piero Frassinelli (former member of Superstudio) and his recent collaboration with 2A+P/A (architectural practice based in Rome).
During the symposium Frassinelli and 2A+P/A (Gianfranco Bombaci and Matteo Costanzo) will discuss the project together with Jacopo Benci (British School at Rome), Markus Lahteenmaki (Drawing Matter Foundation) and Sam Jacob (Sam Jacob Studio); a unique opportunity to explore Frassinelli’s important role within the famous Florentine collective and to debate from different angles the long lasting influences and the operative potential of Superstudio’s work in the contemporary condition.
Savage Architecture presents a journey to the root of the relationship between architecture and man in four episodes. Departing from Frassinelli’s unpublished proposal for an Anthropology Research Center (1968), lingering on the dystopian and revealing scenarios of The Twelve Ideal Cities (1972), the trajectory culminates in the recent collaborative projects of Frassinelli and 2A+P/A for the Budapest Ethnographic Museum (2014) and the Central Archive of Human Cultures (2015).
This fifty-year-long journey among different experiments unveils the foundations of a project alternative to the current blind faith in economic and technological reason. The anthropological gaze gives form to an architecture that is savage because it refuses to impose the power of reason over the symbolic, animal, vital and therefore political dimension of man.
Savage Architecture rejects the domestic man and looks at the primitive without the burden of progress or development but instead with the freedom of the barbaric, the wisdom of the ancestral, and a profound awareness of the collective character of architectural knowledge.
Savage Architecture is the difficult achievement of a field of tensions between control and freedom, narrative and technology, individual expression and collective rituals. A project that, conscious of the violence inherent in human relationships, imagines mechanisms and narratives to give form and value to irreducible dichotomies of mankind.
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