design, english, architecture, radical design

ARCHITECTURAL MEMORIES 9999 SPACE ELECTRONICS

by Francesca Balena Arista

On February 27, 1969 in Florence, on Via Palazzuolo, Space Electronics opened, a large locale-workshop, disco, and much more, designed and run by the 9999 group (Giorgio Birelli, Carlo Caldini, Fabrizio Fiumi, Paolo Galli), who were part of the Florentine radical avant-garde.

If, as Andrea Branzi writes in his book An Exaggerated Generation - From the Italian Radicals to the Crisis of Globalization, radical projects are often the visual track of a sound track, then it should come as no surprise that 9999 designed and ran a nightclub. In Branzi’s book, the parallel between radical groups and music bands is clear: “Pop music bands were our reference . . . Besides, new music had been a model not only for the radical current, but for our entire generation as well . . .” Space Electronics became an important reference point for all Florentine avant-garde movements, for the radicals, but also for art and music avant-gardes.

Carlo Caldini, one of the founders, had this to say: “The new club would be a multimedia environment where, thanks to the strong use of new media, you could feel the coexistence of a bigger ‘global’ world where everyone could rapidly come into contact with various cultural activities the moment they where produced. Space Electronic’s doors were open to music, theater, dance, painting, and architecture.” The 9999 group’s attention to new media had already been clearly expressed in the “multimedia project happening” at the Ponte Vecchio in Florence: on February 25, 1968, between 11 pm and midnight, the photo of an astronaut floating in space, another of a Los Angeles highway junction, and some geometric drawings were screened on Ponte Vecchio, creating a fascinating and unsettling contrast, all at the same time. The pace of the screening recreated a beating heart, and mixed classical music with songs by Pink Floyd. In fact, this happening picked up on the light game technique used by Pink Floyd.

On November 17 and 18, 1969, at Space Electronics, Florence’s Theatre Off Festival presented Hamlet; Julian Beck and Judith Malina from the Living Theatre in New York staged Paradise Now and Antigone by Sophocles. From November 9 to 11, 1971 (the fall equinox) Space Electronics held the Mondial Festival S-Space. S-Space, the acronym for “Scuola Separata per l’Architettura Concettuale Espansa,” was a 9999 and Superstudio coproduction. S-Space was, as the organizers themselves called it, “an experience and catalogue for conceptual, expanded, impossible, imaginary, and reflective architecture . . . S-Space is an organization where information is exchanged on the state of autre architecture.” At the Mondial Festival Ant Farm, Street Farmer, Zzigguratt, Ugo La Pietra, Gianni Pettena, U.F.O., and others took part; Superstudio presented the projects “Twelve Ideal Cities” and “Interplanetary Architecture.”

It’s almost impossible to find documentation on this quite rich line-up of events that made Space Electronics important. If you’re lucky (and very, very persistent), you might come across a quite rare book, Architectural Memories, published in 1974, which gathers and illustrates in chronological order all of 9999’s works and, consequentially, the activity of this extraordinary locale-disco-happening space. So you may be moved reading about the audiovisual environment: “In that candid, intense, sweet dream, the adjectives for defining space were evanescent, mobile, fluttering, without a definite color. It’s not that a sense of balance didn’t exist, instead it was enriched by the third dimension, since all physical realities are weighed in space. The process of the temporal succession of events unfolded according to a more or less linear course, though simultaneously in which various actions and feelings appeared at the same time and dazzlingly. This was a veritable architecture process and not just a traditional project . . .As in the midst of that sweet dream, the architecture of Space is inexistent; that flash in the eyes that throbs like our heart alarms us and makes us cry, the reflection on the silver walls has by now become a myriad of stars as red as bruised strawberries in an exposed wall of R.C. with the signs of the formwork in wood. The feather-light white, orange, and green parachute from San Bernardino in California moves like a frothy sea wave when the air changes, leaving the yellow vents of the air conditioner and vaporizing into a light pine scent. What is a space limit? An impossible space? And why do we believe that space isn’t made of sounds or scents or darkness like light?”.

Among the pale pink pages of Architectural Memories you’ll also find “Forest, Competition Project for the Universit  di Firenze,” from 1971, where 9999 proposed to grow a “cybernetic forest” of sequoias in the city’s historic center: “Weighty, outdated, massive, awkward, obstructive architecture has finally been rendered useless by this new technology. A comeback in eating only food from Mother Earth, and the learning and information process takes place among the trees, perhaps by running or swinging or hanging from one.”

But finding this book isn’t easy because, as Andrea Branzi already wrote in 1973: “9999’s choice was precise: privately managing their culture, without delegating it to institutions. That’s why they must enter ‘inside’ things to manually fulfill them, with the humility of an artisan who lacks managerial ambitions; they made . . . a book on their work, in 500 copies, with a cover in hand-cast copper. A effort lasting six months.”

Francesca Balena Arista, “Architectural Memories 9999 Space Electronics” WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN FRUIT OF THE FOREST MAGAZINE, PAPER ISSUE #5 SPRING 2014. ©FORTINO EDITIONS ©THE AUTHOR