As part of the Modern European Architects lecture series, last night at The National Museum of Australia, Dr Enrico Taglietti delivered a lecture titled: The Portal to the Impossible - one hundred years of Italian architecture. Enrico Taglietti, declaring all architecture preceding the 20th century as ‘Classic’ opened the lecture with an excerpt from the Futurist manifesto,

“A moronic mixture of Egyptian, Gothic and Classic stylistic elements mask the skeletons of architecture. This is the supreme imbecility of the last century’s perpetuating anachronistic models instead of searching for new frontiers……………………….

To the Futurists, architectural expression was developed to express a rigorous ideology, associated with forging culture through war. Enrico talked of Architecture free of dogma and forgery, and of Architects having the freedom to create new work perhaps building on the legacy and freedom created by the Futurists.

It occurred to me that apart from the red tape and process obstacles exerted by the planning bodies in their effort to enforce mediocrity, architectural expression has never, in my experience, been a matter of life and death, or even of rigorous committed ideological debate. Enrico’s lecture functioned as a partly personal, partly historical journey through half a dozen architects and limited examples of key works. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Aldo Rossi, Joe Ponti, Nathan Rogers, Renzo Piano were all discussed in the context of Italian modern Architecture. There were a few human moments that endeared the lecturer to the audience, when the English name failed to come, the quick exclamation in Italian sufficed, with the next slide quickly loaded. Enrico was also quite elegant in his paraphrasing of Marinetti for one and others;

“that a purely architectural man does not exist, but that an artist does exist and with luck can become an architect”