Curating Italy’s Architectural Nightlife

Too often research is confined to words expressed on paper, in conferences or in the classroom. Still rare is the opportunity (or the desire) to communicate our ideas in other media for audiences beyond the research community. Recently I was able to do just that, with Radical Disco: Architecture and Nightlife in Italy, 1965-1975, an exhibition at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) from December 2015 to January 2016. I co-curated the show with Sumitra Upham, then a curator at the ICA, who instigated the project and invited my collaboration. As a design historian hugely interested in post-war Italy this was an unmissable opportunity; a chance to explore a little-known episode in Italy’s celebrated architectural and design past, and to tell this story through a multimedia exhibition for the ICA’s broad and diverse visiting public.

Radical Disco brought together seven nightclubs designed by architects in Italy in the mid 1960s and 1970s. The show is named after the Radical Design avant-garde, whose architects sought to overturn their professions’ market and modernist orientation and use it as a tool for politically charged societal change. Six of the discos displayed were designed by Radical architects: Ugo La Pietra’s Bang Bang, a combined disco and boutique in Milan (1968); the Piper in Turin (1966) and L’Altromondo in Rimini (1967) designed by the architects who would later form Gruppo Strum; Superstudio’s Mach 2 (1967) and Gruppo 9999’s Space Electronic (1969) in Florence, and Bamba Issa (1969) in Forte dei Marmi, by Gruppo UFO.

The one disco featured not associated with the movement was the Piper, which opened in an ex-cinema in Rome in 1965 with an interior designed by Manilo Cavalli and Francesco and Giancarlo Capolei. As Italy’s first discotheque we had to include the Piper; it was so influential that “Piper” became shorthand for this new type of leisure venue. In those years its stage hosted performances from Patty Pravo to Procul Harem and its walls featured artworks from Andy Warhol to Piero Manzoni. It was also significant architecturally: the Piper’s centre-less, informal and reconfigurable furnishings, and its use of multimedia technology to create an experiential architecture, were seen to represent the democratic and participatory built environments that the Radicals sought.

The exhibition is the latest manifestation of an on-going research interest in Radical Design. In 2013 I co-edited The Italian Avant-Garde: 1968-1976 (Sternberg Press) with Alex Coles, which sought to offer new, critical perspectives on the Radicals, including a chapter on Space Electronic by 9999 member Carlo Caldini. The book led to an invitation to curate an installation at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale. The result was Space Electronic: Then and Now a multi-media installation on the club’s life past and present: Space Electronic, as well as Bamba Issa, the Rome Piper and L’Altromondo are all still going today, although now all are commercial spaces with little trace of their earlier radicalism. These spaces’ continued existence and the legacy of their experimental past are amongst those questions that I hope to continue exploring on paper and in other media, for the research community and beyond.