DIALOGUE OF OPPOSITES. Designing function, dysfunction, and narrative

SERIES: Building telling architecture
SPEAKER: Franco Raggi, architect
DATE: Thursday 26 September, 6 pm

A project is trivially a technical procedure for improving the state of things. If a project does not improve the state of things, it is a bad project or, at best, a useless project.

If it improves them, it is a good project. Unfortunately, what is not easy to define is the concept of “improvement.” If we step outside, as of necessity, the purely functional aspect of satisfying performance, we find that a functional project/object can be unpleasant, ugly, insufficient, or, at best, irrelevant. The relevance of a project then, after satisfying the mere function, is based on the communication quotient of others, that is, on the ability to tell, evoke, deny, and sublimate a condition of relationship with the overall context in which the project is placed. Historical, technical, aesthetic and I would even say ethical context when a project/object suggests a critical and poetic vision together of the state of things.

Through the illustration of the work of others and my own, I will try to tell how the communicative power of a project is based on the declination of opposites, the invention of unexpected juxtapositions, the unraveling of contradictions, the denial of its function itself or its poetic deformation, and finally on the ability to tell all this with a synthetic gesture that seeks to make sense of making and time.

Born in Milan in 1945, after graduating in architecture from the Polytechnic in 1969, he worked at Studio Nizzoli, devoted himself to writing and drawing, and collaborated on architecture and design magazines such as Casabella and Modo, which he directed from 1981 to 1983, and on the organization of exhibitions for the Venice Biennale in 1975/76 and the Milan Triennale in 1973/85. He participated in the activities of the Radical Design groups and then collaborated with Studio Alchimia, with whom he produced products and exhibitions. Since 1977 he has combined his work as an architect with that as a designer, working for brands such as Fontana Arte, Poltronova, Barovier&Toso, Luceplan, Artemide, Danese and Zeus. His works can be seen at the FRAC Museum in Orleans, the Centre Pompidou, the MoMA, the Milan Triennale, and the Museum of Ceramics in Savona. 

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