Milan (Italy) 1968
Triennale Milano: ‘Il grande numero’
Introduction
30 May 1968 saw the opening of the 14th Milan Triennale. The planned closing
date was 10 July of the same year. These six weeks sufficed, given the special
temporal conjunction — May 1968 — to turn it into a wholly unique
case. It was immediately occupied by a group of artists and students. When they
evacuated it, the building had to be repainted to make good the damage and the
other signs of their occupation. The exhibition was better known through photos
of the exhibits and the occupation, its catalogue, newspaper articles and the
manifestos that were issued than by actually being visited. It reopened officially
only on June 23, protected by the police, an event that led to the resignation
of the Triennale’s executive committee, which was responsible for the
exhibition.
Among the participants at this edition of the Triennale were Shadrach Woods,
Alison and Peter Smithson, Aldo van Eyck and Giancarlo De Carlo — the
latter also played a major role in the organization of the event.
Falling between the 13th edition, on the theme of Leisure, and the 15th (which
wouldn’t be held until 1974), at which Aldo Rossi consecrated the formation
of ‘Tendenza’, the theme of the 14th Triennale was ‘The Greater
Number’, a typical Team 10 theme. While it recognized ‘the innovative
force’ that machinery and industrialization had introduced into avant-garde
thinking early in the century, the exhibition claimed that the initial impulse
was now exhausted. ‘Today we know from experience that the machine and
industrialization not only fail to exorcise the monsters that bar the road to
harmonious social development, but also fail to transform architecture and production
into activities capable of miraculously making good the inadequacies of our
physical environment. In fact, despite a number of beneficial achievements,
they produce an equal number of aberrant events that compromise our environment
even more radically and rapidly than ever happened before.’
As the guide to the exhibition stated, the outlines of its programme were first
discussed at the Convention of the Delegates of the Member Nations in 1965 and
then developed by the Centro Studi della Triennale; finally they were formulated
by two subsequent commissions. These commissions were made up of De Carlo (architect),
Prof. Pasquale Morino (academic), Carlo Ramous (sculptor), Alberto Rosselli
(architect), Prof. Albe Steiner, Marco Zanuso (architect) and Aldo Rossi (architect),
who later withdrew. Alongside them other names appeared in the exhibition catalogue.
Yet, despite all these names, it is undeniable that De Carlo played the principal
part in the conception of the exhibition and its defence. It was in fact De
Carlo who went and energetically debated the point with the protesters who were
blocking access to the Triennale in the first few days after it opened.
The purpose of the exhibition devoted to ‘The Greater Number’ was
to clarify the general and specific objectives ‘bound up with types of
spatial organization and forms’, seeing them in relation to the immense
power of the instruments available. It explored outstanding problems connected
with form and typology, as well as ‘the new dimension of urban planning,
mass production, the new behaviour of social groups, increased mobility, rapid
obsolescence, and new ways of perceiving physical reality.’
To Team 10 the 14th Triennale presented the opportunity to revisit this theme
once again, yet the Team 10 members came up with quite new and different ways
of investigating and imagining this question. Only Woods (together with Joachim
Pfeufer) made a contribution much more in line with the earlier CIAM and Team
10 debates on the concept of habitat. On the other hand the Woods/Pfeufer pavilion
was the one that directly linked the issues of urban planning and design with
political questions — the accompanying book is entitled ‘Urbanism
is Everybody’s Business’.
Besides the Italian section, numerous other countries presented national exhibits
(though the Soviet Union, People’s Republic of China and India were not
represented), and a large general section was entrusted to different curators.
This was the most significant part of the 14th Triennale. Among other exhibits,
it included an introductory section devoted to errors and information (the latter
section also curated by De Carlo); one on the ‘macro-transformations of
the territory’ (Arata Isozaki); ‘transformations of the physical
environment’, one section being explored by the NER group (from the Soviet
Union), another by Archigram; ‘the transformation of the city through
urban services’ (Romualdo Giurgola, Peter Black, David Crane, Don Lyndon);
and ‘production for big numbers’ (George Nelson).
Above all, the most significant and interesting sections were those devoted
to changes in the perception of urban events (Hugh Hardy, Malcom Holzman, Norman
Pfeiffer) and of the ‘nocturnal landscape’ (Gyorgy Kepes, Thomas
McNulty, Mary Otis Stevens), the contributions by Aldo van Eyck — ‘on
the importance of the small scale compared with the large scale’ —
and by Alison and Peter Smithson on ‘urban ornament’. Van Eyck stressed
the importance still possessed in the civilization of the ‘greater number’
of extraneous elements such as natural phenomena, minor objects, non-serial
production, imaginative freedom and fantasy. The Smithsons explored the theme
of the city and its transformations by events (a wedding in the city) or invisible
ornaments (from overhead tramlines to cars, horses, rainfall and the seasons).
These ‘eccentric’ sections, which sought to reassess historical-environmental
phenomena and explore mutations in architectural form, offer the most interesting
keys to an interpretation of the event. Next to these two sections there was
also a noteworthy exhibit devoted to ‘Protest Among the Young’ organized
and designed by De Carlo, the film director Marco Bellocchio, and the painter
Bruno Caruso. Added in a second phase of the Triennale, this section reconstructed,
a few days after the actual events, a Parisian street with paving blocks, barricades
and the young demonstrators. ‘Milan = Paris’ and ‘Paris Opéra
= Milan Triennale’ were some of the banners that appeared during the occupation,
showing what the Milan protesters were thinking. But one had: ‘The Triennale
is not Paris — Merde to the Falsifiers’, criticizing the ‘forgery’
De Carlo enacted in this exhibit.
This edition of the Triennale, deeply criticized and judged ‘mediocre’,
attacked for its ‘reformist’ vision of the problem of the Greater
Number, brought a cycle to a close by exhausting the formula of the major exhibition.
In reality the true objective of the occupation and the critics was the institutional
role of the Triennale. Already in crisis, the Triennale had to wait several
years before it was given a new statute and was able to mount a new exhibition.
De Carlo’s idea of involving the protesters in a fruitful debate over
the reorganization of the institution had no sequel.
Mirko Zardini
Team 10 members present
Included in the exhibition were installations by:
De Carlo: The protest of the young people
Van Eyck: Mourning the butterflies
A./P.Smithson: Wedding in the City
Woods: The transformation of urban structure through the new conceptions
of the ‘habitat’ of ‘the greatest number’
Bibliography