Gibellina, known as "Sicily’s Marfa", is looking for a revival
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7874044,12.9707702,444m/data...
check some of the photospheres to see how it looks at ground level
There's something magical to concrete mega monuments (the Balkans have quite a collection, btw), like massive ruins-that-are-not-quite-ruins.
It could have been a park, a farm, a forest. It could have been left as an interesting ruin for humans to explore and nature to reclaim. But in the name of some selfish artistic vision, this person built a vast concrete wasteland.
Good art triggers strong emotions, I suppose. I feel horror and revulsion.
I find it irrelevant myself.
Its really a memorial, not modern art:
"I told him immediately, ‘let’s go see the old town’. It was almost 20 km away and I was just shocked. I almost felt like crying and then this idea came to me: here I could do something… This is what I would do: we compact the ruins — which are a problem for everyone — we reinforce them well, and with concrete, we create an immense white crack as a permanent symbol of what happened here,” Burri described on first seeing the ruins of Gibellina.
Did he see the disaster as an opportunity to ply his trade at an even greater scale? Sixteen years after the earthquake, he was asked not to build a memorial, but to help reconstruct the new city. He declined and created this piece instead. Your quote in context:
> mayor Ludovico Corrao called upon numerous architects and artists to help with reconstruction efforts. [...] “We went to Gibellina [...] When we finally arrived to visit the place, the new city was nearly complete and full of new pieces. ‘I can’t do anything here,’ I told him immediately, ‘let’s go see the old town’. It was almost 20 km away [...]
So what? The artist had a style of art in which he was an expert and known for. I totally get and respect that his art is not your cup of tea, but I don't see any negatives in the fact that he did see the opportunity to build this as a opportunity to "ply his trade" as you put it. Would you rather have him build something in a style he's totally unfamiliar with and bad at?
Most importantly, given that globalization and technology have resulted in a "homogenization" of a lot of art and culture, this piece feels truly unique to me (I also thought it was just a glitch in Google Maps when I first saw it) in a way that's very rare these days.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oTaTK99em6U
Well, not my cup of tea to say the least.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/Runit_Do...
Concrete, more specifically brutalism, these buildings tend to be very opinionated. In many of those constructions even tables are made from concrete as part of the building, they enforce a particular function.
In one way its magical, it is shaping you because you have no choice but follow the architects vision and that vision is usually some idealised version of the future - an acquired taste. For example, Barbican Centre in London was supposed to be this utopia about living in the future. I'm big fan of it and because it was close to my office I was frequent visitor, however that vision clearly failed.
It very divisive style, and the division is %90 hate it, %8 feel unsure about it and the %2 love it but when you count the opinion(an opinion made of strong, large concrete pieces) of the building it easily surpasses the %50 love and the building stays.
Pretty sure the goal of this project was to funnel somebody's, probably the state's, funds into the contractors who covered an acre of ground in a thick concrete slab, and similar, admittedly stunning, feats. I wonder if the concrete in those sculptures is of the same quality as the concrete of Genoese bridges.
We used to have ambitions and utopias, as societies; we used to think the future can be whatever we want it to be, that work would be done by machines, that we would live free in our flying cars, that nobody would go hungry, etc etc.
Obviously, it didn't happen; partially because some of these ambitions were unrealistic, but partially because we simply stopped believing it was possible to live without an incessant capitalist-driven commercialization of every inch of our existence.
That's your problem right there! The 'garden city' concept had already failed by the 1960s (both of the true garden cities were built by Howard in 1903 (Letchworth) and 1920 (Welwyn GC) - he died in 1928, so he wasn't popular in the 1960s).
What they were probably getting confused over, was the new town concept of the post-WW2 era, when towns such as Slough and Milton Keynes, which, as brutalist horrors, were already roundly panned by everyone except fashionista architects at the time they were built, and predictably sank into deprivation and decay by the 1980s.
Neither Garden Cities nor New Towns took into account any of the organic usage patterns that developed in organic towns, and thus ended up producing cultural wastelands for different reasons - Garden Cities because howard was a Quaker and had unpopular religious motivations resulting in stepford style living. And new towns because brutalism is depressing as fuck unless you're a fashionista, and encourages antisocial behaviour in normal people.
Never before in history had there been a profession as infested with snake-oil peddling, arrogant, hucksters.
70 years later numerous cities all around the world are still dealing with the echoes of their concrete monstrosities, err, monstrocities.
A famous and skilled surgeon suffering from the most deeply entrenched and severe god complex known to medicine would take one look at the lot of them and say "god damn you got me beat".
The one 1960s garden city / new town project that I’m most familiar with is Tapiola, part of Finland’s capital Helsinki area:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tapiola
It was praised by the 1960s urban planners and architects, yet remains attractive today with high property values and a popular mix of suburban-style living combined with easy access to urban services. (Though it surely helps that Helsinki built an expensive metro line straight through Tapiola, and that some of Finland’s leading universities were relocated into the area from central Helsinki within the past 10-15 years.)
One of my pandemic trips was touring Italy by Vespa, from the Alps to Sicily. I rode right past Gibellina without knowing it was worth a stop.
That was actually one of the challenges of the trip. If you're touring California, there's often only one road to get where you're going. In my case, I just took PCH the whole way north.
Italy has thousands of years of villages and paths between them. Their road grid is a spiderweb. Even figuring out what route to take on any particular day needed a lot of research and some random luck.
They could do this really really easily, and it would be EPIC and offer you the chance to discover things you basically NEVER would know about otherwise...
On the other side: more notifications while driving? No, thanks - bad for safety, likely to be very annoying, and extremely likely to be coopted by adsense ("did you know? Just 1 mile ahead you'll find the newest McDonald's in the city...")
I don't agree with these kind of moral hazard arguments which attempt to prove progress is impossible. It's not my problem that google may screw something up - they can do that if they want, and we can react. I do not accept any responsibility to "not think of ideas which would help me, because some other group may do something bad with them". How could you even go through the day, if you hold yourself responsible for potentially bad things other people could do?
Invent new medicine? Oh that's bad, maybe an evil army would use it to keep their soldiers alive. The entire point of life is to fight bad things and support good ones; I'm not going to just stop trying to progress.
My point is more that google's chokehold on mapping has meant nearly ZERO product innovation has happened in this space for 10+ years.
Very unique place, located in the center of a busy metropolitan city. Great feeling when you enter it, going from noisy cars, people and city life to something like a tranquil garden filled with art.
Oh and fwiw per wikipedia since 1997 it's an independent republic, the Republic of Užupis.
I did feel it got it exactly right.
It’s the grand utopian disappointment to realize beauty isn’t enough.
Brunello Cucinelli is doing the same thing in Solomeo Umbria, but this time trying to use classical architecture and fund it all privately with his billion dollar fashion label. I visited and it’s impressive, but still quiet.
Because you have to actually be malevolent to entertain even the slightest notion that any of these designs could ever possibly be a good idea. They're insults. No, worse than insults - they are violence. These grotesques do violence to the landscape. They assault the eyes. They rape beauty.
>What can you do with a failed postmodern utopia?
Destroy the abominations and reuse the stone to build prisons for everyone who had a hand in designing and green-lighting these experiments.
/s
Or, you know, find new ways to use these things. Brutalist architecture is absolutely fantastic for street-art, for example, or to shoot sci-fi films.
Beauty is everywhere, when one has eyes open to beauty.