Tra archetipi e banalità. Due legittimazioni del Postmoderno

The first edition of the Architecture Biennale in Venezia is usually remembered for two outstanding exhibitions: Aldo Rossi’s Teatro del Mondo (World Theater), the ambitious floating pavilion recalling the ancient theaters realized for Festa della Sensa in the Venetian tradition; Paolo Portoghesi’s Strada Novissima, realized by twenty designers who shaped likewise different façades, evoking an urban street where he reuse of some construction archetypes from the classical tradition plays a key role. These two significant events have given Italian architecture a global spotlight, marking a new awareness of the role of “history” and the “past” in contemporary architectural design. However, they are just the “leading edges” of a complex event, characterized by several “sections,” all representing the new paradigm of post-industrial society defined as “Post-modern” by Jean-Françoise Lyotard. On this topic, the installation curated by Alessandro Mendini, Paola Navone, Daniela Puppa, and Franco Raggi at the same Biennale, dedicated to the “banal object,” took a meaningful yet unfortunately almost forgotten role. This exhibition hosts thirty daily-use objects produced by the mass industry, subjected to an “aesthetical treatment” to denounce the need to return to product unicity in mass culture. This exhibition denounces the issue of mass production, fostering the recovery of more artistic and artisanal work close to popular aesthetic culture. In the same installation, a large painting by Arduino Cantafora, entitled La Città Banale, also draws attention to the failures of modern design culture linked to the purist language dictated by mass building production, so dear to the International Stile. The proposed paper analyzes this important exhibition’s theoretical and practical relevance, re-evaluating its effects in connection with the Strada Novissima project. The aim is a critical revision of the concepts of “archetype” and “banal”: these two legitimations were expressed by Paolo Portoghesi to advocate higher «democratization of architecture.» Two ideas can help us understand the inevitable failures of the official design culture towards contemporary mass society. A waste that, sooner or later, the architectural design will have to try to restore.