The Diary of Jakob Knulp.

Designer’s inquiry

As designers, how do we relate to the structural precariousness of everyday life, to the cuts to culture and welfare, to the lack of social protection and support as workers? How are we reacting to an educational system that forms “industry-ready” creative subjects? How aware are we, as producers of knowledge and languages, of being a fundamental component of the current economic system?

The investigation Designers’ Inquiry takes as a starting point both questions like these and a series of difficulties in contemporary society that brought us to desire a radical change for our lives. The inquiry can thus be seen as an attempt to address these questions and desires: on the one hand, by capturing the conditions of life and work of designers in Italy, and, on the other hand, by initiating a dialogue as well as a critical reflection on the profession itself.

Influenced by the model of co-research, the 78 questions elaborated in theDesigners’ Inquiry tried to involve the participants in a reflection on their own condition, thereby opening the path for possible cooperations and common struggles. A first “collective step” had already been taken in the stages following the collection of the responses: the evaluation of the data and their conceptual, visual and verbal elaboration have been developed publicly through workshops at which a diversity of designers interested in the project participated. The long-term objective of Designers’ Inquiry is to continue to produce tools of analysis, but above all tools for shared actions that aim at intervening in the present state of reality.

Read the report

L’alieno

la verita in architettura, note

«Per questo mercato (ndr immobiliare) non funziona più il modello del quartiere, del quartiere-villaggio del dopoguerra con i suoi rimandi comunitari e rurali. A ben vedere, “quartiere” è una nozione urbana, vuol dire un quarto di città, deriva dalla città romana. Facciamo un cattivo uso di questa parola quando interpretiamo il quartiere come un villaggio e non come una parte di città. Inoltre, nell’abbandonare quell’idea postbellica del villaggio, con i suoi pregi solidaristici, siamo giunti alla sua versione più impoverita negli interventi attuali, dove un gruppo di condomini nel verde e chiusi da una recinzione prende ancora il nome di quartiere. Lo considero un modello scadente perché indicativo di preoccupazioni che gli abitanti normali secondo me non dovrebbero avere. Non dovrebbero ad esempio avere paura della città, non dovrebbero intendere il verde come un elemento per stare distanti l’uno dall’altro, non dovrebbero apprezzare l’isolamento della casa da tutto il resto. Questi nuovi operatori della trasformazione urbana dovrebbero impegnarsi a realizzare naturalmente quello che gli italiani in realtà conoscono alla perfezione, perché gli italiani sanno benissimo come si vive nelle città, non sanno piuttosto come si vive nella periferia.

[…]

Sappiamo benissimo invece vivere la città. E non mi risulta, nonostante, la diffusione dei fenomeni di sprawl in Lombardia, che ci sia un fuggi-fuggi generale dalle città: casomai il limite è nella maniera nostalgica di intendere la città come centro storico. Quando la città diventa centro storico vuol dire che non abbiamo più fiducia di poterla continuare tranquillamente. E cosa vuol dire farla? Vuol dire fare gli isolati, fare le strade, vuol dire fare gli edifici ‘ibridi’, con un piano terra significativo, con degli usi diversificati, che magari hanno delle attività lavorative nei primi tre piani. Così come sempre stato per le nostre città e come avviene anche in certi Paesi avanzati, dove ci sono gli home-office per le persone che lavorano a casa, o ancora nel centro di Milano dove gli uffici occupano lo spazio di alcune abitazioni. Credo che sia arrivato il momento di superare il modello del condominio monofunzionale, con il piano terra inutilizzato e il verde intorno». (pp. 32-33)

Contro lo sprawl, ma anche contro la media densità della città, che cresce per gruppi di “condomini recintati”, e contro i centri storici trasformati in “parchi a tema”

la verita in architettura, Nicolin
via WA

Madri, patrie e nemici..

Parlando con i miei studenti alcuni hanno usato l’espressione madre-patria. Per i cinesi la patria e’ una madre, magari non perfetto ma che comunque sta facendo il bene dei suoi figli.
Ma per noi italiani cos’e’ la patria?

Energy consumption

The power of visual ( and of Hans Rosling/Gapminder) shows, for those who still do not understand, that going to poor/developing countries and starting the sustainable blabla has no much sense.Stay home and turn the AC off.

The third man

Italy has a new target of complain: Mario Monti. After seeing in him the savior in last December and hoping he was the man that could save the country’s economy, he is now probably the most hated man in Italy (at least until the national football team will loose because of a referee decision).

Mr. Monti rises only taxes and does not cut the huge cost of public administration, many say. He is a man protecting bank (has anyone read his cv? was there someone who thought he was some sort of extreme left revolutionary?).

Unfortunately few forget to mention that the economy problem started at least 3 decades ago, few forget to mention that when politician say they would cut taxes everyone jumps happily and no one wonders where that money that is not collected will be taken from.
Others forget to mention that italians still perceive the res publica (the common thing) as something that can be taken for private advantage.
Others forget to mention that it is considered smart (furbo in italian) to avoid paying taxes, to get early retirement money, to pretend to have physical handicap. Because at the end we all know that is always only the referee’s fault.

DPRK / Italy

Interesting to notice that 1994 and 2012 are key years in DPRK as well as in Italy…

Dialogo tra nemici

Italy 1948..

2. Italy 1947-1948: Free elections: Hollywood style

“Those who do not believe in the ideology of the United States, shall not be allowed to stay in the United States,” declared the American Attorney General, Tom Clark, in January 1948.{1}
In March, the Justice Department, over which Clark presided, determined that Italians who did not believe in the ideology of the United States would not be allowed to emigrate to, or even enter, the United States.
This was but one tactic in a remarkable American campaign to ensure that Italians who did not believe in the ideology of the United States would not be allowed to form a government of a differing ideology in Italy in their election of 1948.
Two years earlier, the Italian Communist Party (PCI), one of the largest in the world, and the Socialist Party (PSI) had together garnered more votes and more seats in the Constituent Assembly election than the Christian Democrats. But the two parties of the left had run separate candidates and thus had to be content with some ministerial posts in a coalition cabinet under a Christian Democrat premier. The results, nonetheless, spoke plainly enough to put the fear of Marx into the Truman administration.
For the 1948 election, scheduled for 18 April, the PCI and PSI united to form the Popular Democratic Front (FDP) and in February won municipal elections in Pescara with a 10 percent increase in their vote over 1946. The Christian Democrats ran a poor second. The prospect of the left winning control of the Italian government loomed larger than ever before. It was at this point that the US began to train its big economic and political guns upon the Italian people. All the good ol’ Yankee know-how, all the Madison Avenue savvy in the art of swaying public opinion, all the Hollywood razzmatazz would be brought to bear on the “target market”.
Pressing domestic needs in Italy, such as agricultural and economic reform, the absence of which produced abysmal extremes of wealth and poverty, were not to be the issues of the day. The lines of battle would be drawn around the question of “democracy” vs. “communism” (the idea of “capitalism” remaining discreetly to one side). The fact that the Communists had been the single most active anti-fascist group in Italy during the war, undergoing ruthless persecution, while the Christian Democrat government of 1948 and other electoral opponents on the right were riddled through with collaborators, monarchists and plain unreconstructed fascists … this too would be ignored; indeed, turned around. It was now a matter of Communist “dictatorship” vs. their adversaries’ love of “freedom”: this was presumed a priori. As one example, a group of American congressmen visited Italy in summer 1947 and casually and arbitrarily concluded that “The country is under great pressure from within and without to veer to the left and adopt a totalitarian-collective national organization.”{2}

Read the rest on http://killinghope.org/bblum6/italy1.htm

Parole, parole, parole..