Architect, artist and critic, professor of the History of Contemporary Architecture at the University of Florence and of Planning at California State University, Gianni Pettena (born 1940 in Bolzano) belongs to the original group—along with Archizoom, Superstudio and UFO—of radical Italian architecture. Without denying his background in architecture, he was convinced of the need to rethink the meaning of the discipline, just like the other “radicals”, using the languages of “spatial” research of
Conceptual Art and American
Land Art, instead of the traditional languages of architectural planning. This tendency emerges from the publication
L'anarchitetto and from the performance-declaration
Io sono la spia. As a critic and architectural historian, he readdressed the themes of “radicalism” in the exhibition “Radicals. Architettura e Design 1960-1975” at the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 1996 and in the exhibitions “Archipelago” (1999) and “Radical Design” (2004). He has also written on funk architecture, on radicalism, on “spatial” artistic research, as well as design and architecture.
