This year’s edition of the symposium entitled “The Political Dimension of Architecture” shall focus on the relation between architecture and the city. This relation, which for some is obvious and for others is dominated by history, is still the center of debate on the connection between form and politics.

The symposium intends to examine the exemplary case of Medellin, the second largest and most densely populated city of Colombia. It is an unique case in which architecture and small scale urban interventions were agents of a great political and social transformation.

Medellin’s favelas were often considered as one of, if not, the most dangerous places in the world. Thanks to the construction of a suspended subway-cableway, which connects the favelas to the downtown, and of libraries and new schools designed by young local architects, the streets and squares of this neighbourhood, traditionally ghettoized and left under the reign of drug traffickers, were “reintroduced” back to city life. In just over four years, Fajardo, the city mayor, demonstrated that it was possible to improve the quality of urban life, not through police control policies dictated by the “safety” psychosis, but rather, through an ancient tool which can still be revolutionary: architecture.

The Fajardo’s administration conceived architecture as both a tool and a goal within its social and political development program, with evident results of rehabilitation in some traditionally decayed areas which were excluded from the rest of the city.

 

Besides Mayor Fajardo, the other invited speakers are, Elia Zenghelis, a theoretician of urban architectural design with a long experience obtained both in Europea and the United States, and Stefano Boeri, a scholar of the most recent phenomena of metropolitan transformations, some of which have been analyzed in the magazine he edits, Abitare.

The three presentations will be followed by a round table discussion involving different personalities, such as architects, city-planners, artists, historians, writer and critics, who will be invited to express themselves on the political dimension of architecture and on the problems raised by the three speakers.

The city of Florence is perhaps an ideal venue in which to discuss the political dimension of architecture, not only due to its unique history, but also due to its ability of joining very different institutions in such a symposium.

 

This meeting is in fact the result of a constructive cooperation between the Osservatorio sull’Architettura (Observatory on Architecture) of the Targetti Foundation, the School of Architecture of the Syracuse University in Florence, the Corriere della Sera Foundation, the magazine Abitare, the City-planning Councillorship of the Municipality of Florence, the Istituto degli Innocenti and the Osservatorio per le arti contemporanee (Observatory for Contemporary Arts) of the CRF Foundation, all of which manifest the interest of the city to stay at the center of the debate on international contemporary architectural culture.

 

Sergio Fajardo, born in Medellin in 1956, is a Colombian mathematician and politician. After graduating from the Universidad de Los Andes of Bogotà and obtaining his PhD at the University of Wisconsin, Fajardo started an intense academic activity which led him to teaching positions at the Universities of Boulder, Berkely, Oslo, Santiago del Cile and Caracas and to hosting lectures in both Europe and South America. In 2003, he was elected Mayor of Medellin by a large majority vote and within a few years radically transformed the city mainly due to his unprecedented urban policy. For this and other reasons, Fajardo was recognized as 2007 Latin American personality  by Financial Times and he is considered as one of the potential candidates for the 2009 Colombian presidential elections.

 

Elia Zenghelis, born in Athens in 1937, is an architect and design professor.

After studying at the Architectural Association of London, he devoted himself to his professional activity and in the first part of the ‘70s he worked with Georges Candilis, Michael Carapetian, O. M. Ungers and Peter Eisenman. Zenghelis became one of the most stimulating professors at the Architectural Association as he introduced the radical avant-gardes (mainly Superstudio and Coop Himmelblau) in his teaching. In 1975 he established the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) along with one of his former Dutch students, Rem Koolhaas, and their partners at that time, Zoe Zenghelis and Madelon Vriesendorp. Together they designed paradoxical projects and painted surreal paintings depicting these projects, such as the The Sphinx Hotel, many of which are included in the appendix of Koolhaas’s first book, Delirious New York, and are currently displayed at the MoMA in New York. Shortly after the OMA’s project for the Parc de la Villette in Paris – ranked second, yet considered as the moral winning project by many – in 1982 Zenghelis opened an OMA’s office in Athens and slowly his interest in metropolitan architecture was eclipsed by his interest in Mediterranean architecture, evident by his design of several high middle-class residences in the Greek archipel. In 1991, he received a special mention from the Mies van der Rohe Award for the Check Point Charlie building, built in Berlin.

In 1987, Zenghelis left OMA and partnered with Eleni Gigantes, working in several European countries, and devoting himself increasingly more to teaching. In 2000, he received the prestigious Annie Spink Award for Excellence in Education from Royal Institute of British Architects. Teaching at the ETH of Zurich, in Mendrisio, at the Berlage Institute of Rotterdam, as a protagonist of architectural culture, often controversial with the political context of his interventions, Zenghelis is currently engaged in defining a system of “morphological acupuncture to be strategically included in the existing urban quagmire”.

Born in Milan in 1956, Stefano Boeri studied architecture at the Milan Polytechnic University and in 1989 received his PhD in city-planning at the IUAV in Venice. After directing the magazine “Domus”, last September he became the editor in chief of the magazine Abitare. He is currently teaching Urban Design at the Milan Polytechnic University, where he lives and has an architectural studio (Boeri Studio). He has designed many projects redefining European coastlines (Marseille, Thessaloniki, Rotterdam, Mitiline), along with Italian ones (Genoa, Naples, Trieste) and many brown field projects for the rehabilitation of decommissioned industrial areas. Among his works, it is worth noting the ENEL geothermic plant in Bagnore, Tuscany, in 2001. He has been Invited several times to the Venice Biennale and was the curator for the Architectural section of the Milan’s Triennale, for which in 2002, he carried out a research on the future of Europe, U.S.E. Uncertain states of Europe. He organized interdisciplinary exhibits and curated international research projects, trying to always promote the cooperation among very different research groups, such as in the Border Device(s) exhibits, promoted by his research agency “Multiplicity,” with its demonstrative installations, such as Solid Sea displayed in Documenta XI in 2002 in Kassel. More over, Boeri has always been particularly attentive of contemporary photography, by cooperating several times with Gabriele Basilico, Armin Linke, Francesco Jodice, Stefano Graziani and others. In 2007 he and Gianluigi Ricuperati organized the first Cagliari’s Festival of Architecture, “Festarch”.

He has edited such publications such as Sezioni del paesaggio italiano (Arti Grafiche Friulane 1997), Mutations (Actar 2000), USE- Un viaggio nell’Europa che cambia (Skira 2003), and Milano. Cronache dell’abitare (Bruno Mondadori, 2007). www.stefanoboeri.net