The characteristics of the Renaissance artist Filippo Brunelleschi that the Italian architect Andrea Branzi (Florence, 1938) admires are typical of him too. Branzi’s work as a designer, architect and theorist is permeated with a constructive, material and aesthetic research system that captures a specific moment of culture and civilisation. Just as Brunelleschi invented Renaissance architecture with his ingenious creations, in all his work Branzi is also the forerunner of a new spirit of the age.
In the late sixties, when many architects were still designing and building in the modernist idiom, Branzi, together with the revolutionary Archizoom group, put forward the ‘no-stop city’, a theoretical project involving the metropolitan city. They foresaw that the infinite variety and uncontrollable complexity of our contemporary world would require a new architecture. Urban planning and architecture would become soft and diffuse, with uncertain forms that would define a fluid and continuous space.
In our part of the world, Branzi is best known for his furniture and art objects. But this exhibition will show us more than the inventor and creator. It also looks at the importance of his utopian ideas and his visionary powers. Because even now, everything that he produces still relates intriguingly to society, the culture of creation, history and art history, man and the most advanced technology.
COPRODUCERS deSingel international arts campus, Flemish Architecture Institute
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