Giganti, Nomadi, Camaleonti, Ribelli

If the modern movement was founded on the international dimension of the problem the new city had to deal with, the post-war debate was marked by the attempt of recovering the “local” dimension inside the wider backdrop of the trans-national cultural dialogue. The long debate about the peculiarities of local cultures generated complex interpretations searching for the concept of “identity” and “difference” in a globalized world. “Young” and “Italian”: neither of these two “research indexes” is meaningful if applied to the features of the architectural products rather that to the authors of the projects. The projects do not really show any peculiar “local” trait, neither seem to be interested in interpreting a “genius loci” through the device of architectural language: they fully belong to an architectural culture which today travels on the fast track of electronic media. If the Italian music groups of the sixties and seventies tried to find an “Italian way” to rock music, looking for texts which could adapt their metric to new foreign music styles, today’s groups or singers often choose to express themselves in English to reach an international public. What seems to be shared by the different projects by these young Italian architects is the invisible net of limitations and constraints caused by laws and regulations, by the building customs of the construction companies, by the hidden “taste” of the customers who commission the work. This net is what invisibly steers their action; if the quest for “tradition” in architecture often went together in history with the political search for a “nation” character, today it could only be produced by progressive deformations and transplants of modes of being and acting, that will “root” to a place while keeping the dialogue open with a ever complex world culture.