Alessandro Mendini Architecture Art Design

The most important thing today, in creating a fertile relationship between architecture and public art, is to start them together, within a single project. The tradition of urban sculptures dating back to the seventies, saw the work of the artist leaning a posteriori in a space defined only by the architect, as it was to place an ornament above a lawn. In our experience for the Naples Metro, the contact with artists takes place in advance, so that the two creative experiences are intimately integrated, based on methods worked out together. And also, there is no reference to the ancient concept of synthesis of the arts. Arts and architecture today come together and are not synthesized. Assemble and not synthesize: it is the dynamic feature of today’s metropolis, in a life made of fragments. Places and public spaces understood as the back of a theater, where experiences, volumes, colors, images and symbols accumulate out of scale, with a sense of the monument creeping towards falsehood. Urban furniture itself is a stage that slides towards sculpture and performance, and art and architecture merge into utopian visions whose image changes in the continuous transformation of the system of flows, technologies and urban energies. In this sense the situation is brought back to that of the Baroque.