What other ways of practice are possible apart from building? Can we consider an architecture that concerns itself only with a critique of what surrounds it, or a critique of our relationship with the world? That perhaps does not build? A prevalent rhetoric of the Radical Movement in Italy was this very question. Taking practice as a tool for the political, social, and cultural critique of practice, the Radicals’ utopian vision proposed a transgressive view of occupying and performing architecture instead of merely building. The spirit of play and the idea of critique that defined their works is what has always interested me about the Radicals. A couple of months ago, I had the chance to speak to a prominent figure in the Italian design renaissance in a post-World War II era, Gianni Pettena, after having chanced upon an exhibition of his work at a gallery in Sète, a city in France overlooking the Mediterranean Sea.

The talk centred on what practising meant to him, which forms the crux of the exhibition in France. Gianni Pettena: Anarchitecture, a radical exhibition by all accounts, offers visitors a glimpse of this practice and is currently on view at Crac Occitanie till September 1, 2024. Within the showcase, the art exhibition space incorporates immersive installations, videos, and various sculptures that retrace the artist’s career from 1966 to today, with a focus on the bodily activation of space.

While we spoke of his conceptions of architecture as communication, I was also curious about this interest in Pettena’s work. As the Gallery Director, Marie Cozette clarifies, “I've been interested for quite a long time by Radical Architecture and how it aimed to renew the discipline with a critical and somewhat poetic position. When I was director of another institution, I invited a couple of French artists who were fond of the movement to curate a collective exhibition around the notion of ghosts with me. Within this exhibition, they displayed Ice House, an architectural performance Pettena created in the United States in the 70s. And that's how I was introduced to him. Then I saw Paper, an installation where people cut paper strips and make a passage through this dense forest in Centre Pompidou Metz. In another institution in Metz, which acquired one of his works, FRAC Lorraine, I saw Forgiving Architecture. So here and there, I was allowed to see his work, and it remained in my mind.”

My interest in the Radicals stems from being introduced to their ideology during my master's. What fascinated me was their utopian vision of what architecture should be and this “imperative to not build”. Instead, as the name suggests, their critique centred on an inquiry into the roots of practice and consumerism, and an explicit break from the past which they saw as having led to the current moment of the built environment. This explicit link between theory and practice, of defining practice as theory, and their use of montages, collages and communicative tools was what most drew me to their philosophy.

While Pettena was not directly connected to any of the radical groups, namely Archizoom, Superstudio and UFO, he developed friendships with them because of his schooling in Florence. And unlike their pivot into industrial design, Pettena would go on to complete residencies in the US cities of Minneapolis and Salt Lake City in 1971 and 1972. Known as defining moments in his career, it was here that he became friends with artists such as Robert Smithson and was further influenced by the vast North American natural landscapes.

Associated with the anarchist times of the 60s, Pettena’s work is rightly unclassifiable, sitting in the uneasy crevice between art and design. He has himself disavowed the notion of an architecture that must only be built to think about an architecture that instead communicates. Artist, architect, designer, professor, historian and critic of architecture, he thinks of himself above all as an “anarchitect.” This idea is based on a manifesto he wrote in 1973 titled Anarchitecture, a term fellow contemporary and friend Gordon Matta Clark would also coin independently. For Pettena, it means “that type of architecture that finally cannot be distinguished from art.”

This mode of practice allowed him to free the discipline from the constraints of construction to remain creative and critical. Many works within the exhibition space at Crac could be read this way. While the solo exhibition focuses on the body and architecture, the works also explore the idea of architecture beyond the built; as a mediator between body and space in a way negating architecture, turning it in parts into performance, or a “renaturalisation” of the built.

In the gallery spaces, the display includes works that require a body to be deemed art/design/architecture. In the first gallery, the visitor is greeted with a tunnel of black metal frame structures, and a body suit covered in scales hanging on a wall. What could it be for? While people cannot actively use it, as the press release states, the project Sound Tunnel (1966/2024) was one of the very first works conceived by Pettena and has been physically created for the first time for the architecture exhibition. By putting on the suit and moving through the tunnel, the body is transformed into an instrument, it “acts like a breath that shakes the leaves of a forest,” Pettena describes it.

Similarly, the next gallery contains Archipensiero (2009-2024), where a wooden structure completely covered in raffia takes over the space. Emulating the form of a classic Graeco-Roman temple, complete with columns surmounted by a triangular pediment, it can only be viewed in its entirety from a single point of view. In this way, it negates the very ontology of the architectural object by positing that it is the body that makes architecture, or the objecthood of architecture possible, by highlighting the privileging of sight in Classical architecture.

In the subsequent rooms, various sculptures are arranged either in corners or mounted on walls such as the Human wall (2012-2024); which conspicuously displays the traces of the hands that sculpted the surface, body and object becoming one. Following in this vein of questioning the presence/absence of a body, Presenza/Assenza (2020) is the artist’s most recent sculpture, created as part of a commission for the Pompeii archaeological site that implies the ghostly form of a seated person, surrounded by foam. It was created in memory of a deceased friend. Ombra (1985 - 2024) similarly implies the presence of some person at some point in time. It is a long black coat like the one worn by the artist, concealing a foldable sitting device that as the curator states is meant to reflect Pettena’s fascination with nomadic cultures and their dwellings. Another seating design on display is Wearable Chairs/Already Worn Chairs (1971 -2024), which are intended to be carried on the back, enabling anyone who “wears” them to sit anywhere, anytime.

The works created by the Italian architect are often transient and destined to disappear like with his most famous Ice House or Clay House. On display at Crac, this idea of transience is signified by Paper (1971), an installation made up of thousands of paper strips that fill a whole room, and must be cut to clear a path, the cutting slowly eroding the initial form. The project was created in 1971 at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, where Pettena taught. He encouraged students to cut strips of paper and through this gesture become fully-fledged participants in the creation of architecture. The interlocution between body, design and environment in the works is also highlighted in the video work on display, Architecture + Nature (2011).

The active presence of the body to be able to activate the different installations could also be read as a comment on the idea that architecture can only be possible through the presence of people; hence proposing the dissolution of the architect figure by foregrounding collective action and community. As Pettena writes about his work, they are “ephemeral, reversible projects, whose value is sometimes only documentary: a conceptual architecture that often translates into a physical experience, creating or renewing the need for a relationship with the environment.” The work becomes a way of reading architecture that is not a commodity but becomes an agent in our experience of space, a radical view that forgoes permanence in its simplicity. Each project acknowledges the view that a forgiving architecture is an act of adaptation to the environment.

As Cozette elaborates on the overall spatial experience and curatorial vision, “What’s interesting is that we decided not to show any archival work in the exhibition. Instead, we chose to have sculptures and site-specific installations reactivated from his historical protocols, like Paper.” While the space within the gallery seems to come alive with the works on display, at least in the images I can’t help but think it feels immobile, especially in projects like Wearable Chairs that are conspicuous in the absence of a human body.

However, the question we can still ask of the failed utopias of the Radicals is: is an architecture possible that goes beyond being a tool of speculation and is above all a language, a culture, and a topic of cultural debate? In a roundabout way, with his famous humour, the man himself, smoking a cigar at 5 in the evening gives me something of an answer. “From my point of view, if you go through my work, for example, you verify that I built everything. Maybe for an hour, maybe for a month, maybe for four months, maybe some of them are still there…You know, museums are beautiful, because if you go naked on a sidewalk, you are arrested. But if you are inside of a frame in a museum, you are doing cultural and theoretical work, and you visualise that. I visualised 95 per cent of my production, and some of them still exist.” A cheeky way of positing that after all anything is possible in the confines of the museum.