Unidentified Flying Object (UFO), Performing Architecture

Unidentified FlyingObject (UFO), performer l'architecture" is a collaborative exhibition between the Frac Centre-Val de Loire and the Catholic University of Louvain, paying tribute to one of the most emblematic groups of Florentine neo-avant-garde architects.

 

UFO was founded in 1967 by Lapo Binazzi, Riccardo Foresi, Titti Maschietto, Carlo Bachi and Patrizia Cammeo, all architecture students at Florence University, who were joined in 1968 by Sandro Gioli, Massimo Giovannini and Mario Spinella. In the 1970s, the group helped set up Global Tools, an alternative design laboratory, and until 1978 collaborated on numerous exhibitions, plays, competitions and multidisciplinary magazines. Activist and casual, UFO embodied a trend in radical Italian architecture that was particularly influenced by the semiological theories of Umberto Eco, against a social and political backdrop of workers' and students' strikes.

 

The group's approach aims to free creative behaviour and the imagination by using techniques and fields of expression that are far removed from conventional architectural language. UFO sees architectural projects, designs and objects as 'signs' in the service of counter-communication. By recuperating and hijacking media rhetoric and capitalist symbols, their architecture, imbued with a pop vocabulary, displays a subversive approach and a manifest irony. By introducing an active use of public space and Florentine monuments into their urban interventions, UFO overturns the standards of architecture, which has now become an immaterial object, and turns it into an ephemeral work at the service of a visual experience.