Expo
Article reserved for subscribers
The monumental but precarious installations of the Italian architect, an environmentalist ahead of his time, are poetically exhibited in Crac de Sète.
Height for an architect? Detest the walls whatever they are, these “screens between us and nature”. An architect by training, the Italian Gianni Pettena, now 83 years old, will stick to that program of “anarchitecture” for the rest of his life, to use the title of his manifesto from 1973, building with the wind, building clearings of all kinds, etc. paper tigers, anticipating the risks, now well known, of splitting up and always setting yourself up as a counterattack. “When we move from a nomadic state to a sedentary state, we begin to build a physical screen and depend on nature, on its whims, it becomes a friend or an enemy, we look at it through the window to see good and bad weather, blessed or cursed,” explained Pettena to fine arts students in Toulouse 2018, he who never stopped making movement and movement his motto.
In this interview, he returned, among other things, to the philosophy of the collective project Global Tools, which he helped develop in the 1970s with other radical Italian architects, including Andrea Branzi (future member of Archizoom and Memphis), Alessandro Mendini (founder of the magazine Domus) Or