In 1972, the French art critic and cultural philosopher Pierre Restany launched a call for the conversion of Mount Vesuvius into an international cultural park. Restany curated the call, inviting leading figures from the art world and design. It happened in the "Land art years," which “witnessed a shift from the object to the idea, from form to environment, and from work to gesture”.
Pierre Restany played a pivotal role in transitioning the art world towards a "new realism," which simultaneously critiqued radical abstraction, figuration, and what he called "Stalinist social realism”. Today, a new generation of designers are once more inclined to work directly with reality rather as opposed to meaning. This is a new generation of artists and designers aiming to address the environmental crisis informed by the emerging aesthetics arising from the reality of new scientific observations.
Given this cultural momentum, some of Restany's original propositions gain renewed relevance, as well as his peculiar fascination for the volcano as a powerful and mysterious landscape entity. The vulcano as a site, phenomenon, landscape, and state shifting matter, embodies a fertile force that keeps exposing humanity's fragility in vivid ways, while simultaneously showcasing its capacity to thrive and evolve in the face of potential extinction. Design cultures from regions at volcano’s foothills continue to offer valuable lessons on designing for a ground that can not be taken for granted, never static, where the same matter that composes buildings and landscapes can shift to become designed objects’ most powerful treat.
This studio aims to reenact Pier Restany's call for mount Vesuvius in different volcanic zones around the world. Architecture and landscape architecture students will propose projects in active volcanic zones relying on new knowledge unavailable to the original group of artists and designers convened by Restany. We will delve into a selection of the original visionary proposals, which include figures as disparate as Reuterswärd, Topolino, Enzo Mari, Alessi, Costa-Karahallos, Xenakis, Gruppo “Continuum”, Isozaki, Giannetto Bravi; while at the same time discuss specific volcanic phenomena (and its representations) to guide design. Restany’s manifesto for “new realism” will be a lateral guide, but we will also consider that not everything in his manifesto, or his friend’s ideas about the volcano, aged particularly well.
Proposals developed in the studio may be landscape architecture, buildings, parks, gardens, or ideally a combination of scales. Ten suggested programs are suggested as departure point for the cultural park. As in previous studios, collaboration between architecture and landscape architecture students is encouraged and highly detailed projects are expected.
