Ugo La Pietra

Ah! That’s so nice of you. Thank you.

Thank goodness. I barely eat now, and there was a time you always used to bring me sweets. It’s Ganesh!

I love it! I’ll put it in my collection. And these sticks? Are they incense?

Well, I’d always been attached to the Brera–Garibaldi neighbourhood because I had my place and my studio there for many years. I’d meet up with the other artists at places like the Jamaica. I was also teaching at the Brera Academy, and I was the art director of the Brera International Centre. In the ‘70s, the district was trying to maintain its identity. Garibaldi was a street closely linked to traditional Milanese folk, and in the space of a decade everything changed and it became a territory of consumption. I and many others staged various cultural initiatives, including the Communication Factory, which occupied the former San Carpoforo Church, and used it for a number of exhibitions around that time. So I had a strong relationship to the area. There’s also a place on Via Madonnina that I played at for more than 25 years.

Of course! I played a lot. I played my whole life. At Scimmie, Capolinea, Santa Tecla—at all the places you could play jazz in Milan. Anyway, I lived in that neighbourhood for a long time, but then I received an eviction notice for both the studio and the apartment, and I found this place, which also has a nice studio space below. All this happened during the early ‘90s.

Over the years it’s changed a lot. Other artists from Brera also moved to this neighbourhood: Hidetoshi Nagasawa, Luciano Fabro, and Ignazio Moncada all used to live around here—many friends that unfortunately passed away. See these shelves here, this is a very special place. You can see lots of works by my friends, from Gio Ponti to Ettore Sottsass. Then there’s my own territory. These are all mementos about the history of my family. That’s my uncle, the medals from the Great War, all my relatives, and these are all things my mother left me, as all very religious mothers do. Padre Pio, for example. They all represent my mother’s presence. I care about these things the most, in a very personal way.

Yes, especially because I don’t have a real home. This one, I don’t consider it mine because I’m more attached to my original territory. I’m like most people my age: we always come back to our birthplace, back to all the animals, all the living things, after a life spent somewhere else, one way or another. I have my birthplace, Arpino, where my parents’ house has been destroyed by a sort of earthquake, a ravine. So the most beautiful home I have is an unhabitable one, and it means I can’t go back to my village. I live like someone who lives in another territory and nostalgically is tied to his imagination, to tiny mementos, to tiny things.

You’ll notice that underneath nearly all of my work is the same tiny house, the one that I don’t have, but want.

My childhood and even my youth were always marked by the fact that I was very puny, very shy, and always did badly in school; I was always the last. In short, at 80 I discovered that I was a little dyslexic. So I went to school, but I didn’t learn anything, I didn’t understand anything. Then when I arrived at university to study architecture, I started learning to understand things by myself, using my own criteria, and I became good at it. I started to play the clarinet, learning on my own without knowing the music, and then I became a painter without ever having gone through an academy, having learnt to draw on my own. Well, look what we have here.

This is it! I’ve played since 1953 and I still play, but only for my friends. I can play something for you, if you want?

Black ebony. It’s an antique clarinet that belonged to a Parisian clarinettist in the ‘20s, then a clarinettist from Milan, Bob Valenti, until I bought it. Let’s see, it must be more than 100 years old. It’s older than me. When I started playing, we were a group of guys who listened to jazz records and were therefore very far from the music scene of the ‘50s and the songs coming from Sanremo Music Festival. So we decided to make a so-called band, and each of us picked up an instrument.

The theory of synaesthesia was my thesis discussion, and it’s very simple. I was and still am convinced that we need to overcome the intégration des arts. This is where, for instance, an architect from the ‘30s or ‘40s would’ve left space for bas-reliefs, mosaics, niches for sculptures, and so on. The relationship between architecture and art overlapped, but the two things were ultimately separate. Synaesthesia between arts, on the other hand, is a system which allows the sculptor to share research or results with the architect, with architecture, and vice versa. So the various disciplines interact and evolve with each other. Everyone knows that what is sharp to the touch is acute to the ear. This is a synaesthetic concept. That is, transferring information from one discipline to another while maintaining the identity of the disciplines. Today’s architects barely know anything about art, artists don’t know about architecture, design doesn’t integrate with the applied arts—they’re artisanal while the designer is industrial. All these worlds aren’t interacting with each other.

The exhibitions I curated at Abitare il Tempo in Verona. The fair was organised through the trade association Federlegno and was aimed at classical furniture companies that weren’t usually considered in the world of design; it gave me the opportunity to do a series of experimental exhibitions alongside other cultural exhibitions. Every year, I invited four or five artists and designers—young, old, more important, less important—to each create an environment around a particular theme, by coming up with 10 or 20 objects. Then a whole year would go by just putting them in touch with traditional companies in order to make the pieces. These companies were all different and all based here in Italy—one from Verona, one from Murano, and so on. It led to the intersection of two worlds, where designers got to work with companies that knew traditional and often more sophisticated techniques, such as mosaic, carving, or inlaying. At the same time, none of these companies had ever worked on anything like this before.

One of the environments I remember was part of a show called Rituali Domestici and it was by Cinzia Ruggeri. The story behind her environment was about a big elephant that got scared of little mice and suddenly burst into 1,000 pieces. She came to me and told me she wanted to make elephant ears that could move like a fan, the belly of an elephant that would be a big double bed, a trunk that could be a vacuum cleaner, and Murano glass mice that would light up. I think there was a lamp, a sofa, a chair, and other objects too.

After a year working on these things, I’d go to this pavilion at the fairground and stay there for two weeks, just constructing the sets. On the first day of the exhibition, hundreds of these objects would arrive—objects that I’d never seen before, that I’d only thought about and imagined from sketches. The meeting between these two realities was always full of risks and challenges, so the end result was always a surprise. So you see, all my work to bring handicrafts towards industry is an attempt to explain that all these disciplines should work together in a synaesthetic way.

Exactly, and it’s very easy! But it doesn’t happen often at all. I’ve been in the art world my whole life, but all the people I’ve met stigmatised and condemned me, saying, ‘Architect! You don’t belong with us, what are you doing here?’ When I was a teacher at the academy, everyone was like this—professors who were painters, and my friends too.

‘You can call me Maestro!’ I remember. You see, this is my personal nemesis. There’s always someone introducing me to someone else saying, ‘This is Ugo La Pietra, a famous architect from Milan’. To normal people, if I’m a famous architect, it means I make at least one building a month, so I’m a millionaire. And I’m also from Milan, the hip city, so I’m condemned. If someone introduces me to a grocer, from the very beginning they assume, ‘I’d have to spend millions for him to work on my home!’ If someone presents me to an artist, they think, ‘God knows how many works he’s going to order from me!’ On the other hand, if someone introduces me to a gallerist, the first thing that comes to mind will be, ‘You make drawings? Why don’t you have a show at my gallery?’ And in the end, I did. I made hundreds and hundreds of shows for gallerists who believed that a famous architect from Milan probably had tons of friends who were also famous architects from Milan and willing to buy his works. That was a disaster. A monstruous disaster.

I’m an ‘artistoid’—for this reason and also for the fact that when I was still an architecture student, I was a painter too. I was part of a group of sign painters called the Gruppo del Cenobio, with Ettore Sordini, Agostino Ferrari, and others. So my stance was always very hard to keep, with both my colleagues and the people I was hanging out with. You see these Casa Palcoscenico cabinets? Artists don’t produce this kind of thing. The artist tries to make something to sell. The artisan makes an object with their own hands, puts it on display, and also hopes to sell it. Instead, I’m a researcher, an intellectual. Instead of just speaking or writing, I simply develop films, pictures, montages, objects. This is an ‘artistoid’: someone who acts like an artist but doesn’t spend his whole life trying to sell a product.

Yes. With a product, you can always try to improve it, to communicate it, but an artist wouldn’t shift from ceramics to film. This is a casual attitude, and not of an artist. Because an artist always has to worry about having something to sell. I made everything in a certain way because that particular way looked like the best way to explain the idea I had in mind. Whenever I used to meet with artist friends when we were younger, they would always say, ‘Let’s bargain! This is our retirement!’ They were already thinking about their product gaining value over the years. It’s another way of thinking.

The idea behind that was to find tools, different tools, with which someone could break the equilibrium of a society stifled by certain values. This still happens all the time. It’s like a revolution. If you start a revolution, you can’t revolutionise things for one year and that’s it. If you’re a revolutionary, you’re a revolutionary for life. After a revolution, society is still unable to evolve, transform, and update. There’s always a need for someone to stimulate the change. Revolution should be permanent. When someone says, ‘What about the radical architects?’ my instant reply is, ‘Look, I’m not a radical architect! Because radical architects have been historicised to the ‘70s, and I’ve always been radical! I’m still radical right now!’ If I make a book about greenery, it’s because I’m a radical. At the moment, everyone is talking about ‘green’, as if we’ve only just discovered that plants have feelings, cry, talk, and tell stories. The whole world is suddenly aware of plants, as if it’s a trend. Erbario is the fake scientific compendium I’ve just produced, made like a proper book written by a researcher, and it’s basically a tool to fuck about with people, who are only just realising these things.

This is the role of an intellectual. In Italy we used to have so many intellectuals, people like Ennio Flaiano, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Umberto Eco, who always had a critical, analytical point of view concerning society. There’s a big difference—especially in the past 30 or 40 years—between an artist who works for society and an artist who works in society. If an artist takes a work from a gallery and puts it in the town square, he reaches society, but he doesn’t work for society.

Global Tools was an experimental school aimed at encouraging individuals to develop their creativity freely using tools based on primordial concepts, such as manual skills and the return to traditional cultures and heritage, which were from the Italian countryside but which also addressed suburban areas. We tried to let people understand things that weren’t at all easy to read. Everyone did their own research and each person was oriented towards a category. There were those who worked on the body, those who worked on materials, and those, like me and two others, Franco Vaccari and Gianni Pettena, who instead worked on communication. Communication was a theme I’d already developed with the exhibition on the Telematic House at MoMA, in New York, at the beginning of the ‘70s, and our Global Tools research helped us understand it further. But Global Tools remained a theoretical operation, a practice that led to the definition of some basic theories over two years, and then everything stopped there.

My relationships were above all with the Viennese: Coop Himmelb(l)au, the Haus-Rucker-Co group. My training is much closer to their experience than that of the Florentine groups, like Superstudio or Archizoom. But there was a minimum common denominator that we did all share, coming from a generation that was trying to overcome the dimensions of the discipline of architecture. But everyone did it in their own way. I was closer to environmental and social problems, and above all, having been an artist and painter for many years, I had a different background. I was closer to the world of conceptual art than the world of pop art, which the Florentine radicals were influenced by. Then I directed a magazine called In and later Inpiù, where I published all these radicals, from London and Vienna and also Alessandro Carlini, who was in Germany. In short, all of Europe passed through the magazine.

I’ve always maintained relationships with them. After Global Tools, we did another school project in Venice, so there was a continuity of relationships both in terms of cultural and design intentions, but also from the perspective of profound friendship, especially with Adolfo Natalini.

This is hard. Recently, during a show in Bolzano, a student came up to me and asked, ‘But what do we have to do?’ The answer isn’t very complicated actually, there’s only one answer: you need an ideology. But if the young people from 20 years ago started to lose this ideological component, there’s not much more to do. I use this example: during the ‘70s, we hung out with Sottsass. In front of his studio he had a big sign by Olivetti; he was a designer who was into the production world, but he was also influenced by us. We were against consumerism—a strong ideology. So when he had the task of overviewing the 1971 Triennale, he called on us to showcase some works but asked us to avoid bringing any objects. Objects were synonymous with consumerism of course. So I made my first film, La Grande Occasione. Back then, ideology existed; it made us pick a side and take a position towards society.

In today’s world, what student has a strong ideological position against consumerism? A consumerism that produces these influencers, who basically become millionaires by imposing tastes on younger generations? If these people become millionaires, it means that young generations don’t have even a grain of ideology left. With no ideology, you’re lost. I’m not imposing my ideology; I just want these students to have at least one. It doesn’t have to be right or wrong. When young people used to have the ‘let’s go to war’ ideology during the Great War, all my uncles, the guy next door, and his brother, as soon as they came of age, they went and sacrificed their lives. The ideological component was so strong.

I always say, ‘You want to be a designer? Well, do one thing, go and experience what it means to be in a craftsman’s workshop, go and see how you can transform matter, go, because you’ve never experienced that’. I’d never seen it! I only started to experience those things when I was in my 40s. Architecture schools won’t take their students to a building site to see how people make brick walls. Design schools won’t take their students to make objects in cast bronze or lost wax. No one sees anything, and it’s not enough to have a technical knowledge of things to proceed in life, you know?

Before the ‘70s, in our field, it wasn’t necessary to have this ideological component. Everyone had already been born into a precise enclosure, known as style. If you were born into baroque, you stayed in baroque. If you wanted to do something different, you had to start doing rococo. I was born in the liberty period, and I could’ve stayed there and made small flowers or fight against it and jump—jump and go somewhere else.

With the advent of computers in the ‘80s, formal ideologies were annihilated. At that point, the individual found themself lost, because everything was available. If Kaisha were born in the ‘40s, she wouldn’t have been able to wear pants! Because at that time, women who wore pants were basically ‘whores’. To wear pants was revolutionary! Today we’re born without enclosures. Everything is OK, but not OK at the same time.

Yes, I made masterpieces on methacrylate slabs that only used to be made on canvases. It was kind of an innovation with media, but also with language. Like making experimental movies and telling a two-hour story in two minutes. There were rules, but rules could be broken. Artists have always done that—transgression, being born into an enclosure and stepping out of it, overcoming a language and creating a new one from scratch. You know, in recent years, some entities have come into being, and they have strong personalities, a very personal point of view, but we can’t describe this as a universal language. We can’t describe it as a style. We witnessed the last style in design with Memphis and Alchimia, and since then, nothing new has happened. There’s nothing new to be said.

These two components are very hard to find in the correct ratio. I think the Italian garden is a good example of where they merge well, and labyrinths are the perfect architectural object where the conceptual and the spectacular are very tangible. During the ‘70s, concept was very important. During the ‘80s, spectacularism reigned supreme. Objects from Michele De Lucchi or Sottsass, which were very colourful and happy, represented this new vision very well—a vision where society was moving away from the severe, rigorous, and introverted conceptuality to enter a new, spectacular world.

At the end of the ‘60s I did this series of objects, tools, and environments called Immersioni. The idea came about because architects at the time were proposing urban solutions by going up to a particular social group and asking questions like, ‘Guys, what would you like to have in your neighbourhood? What changes would you like to make in your piazza?’ Asking what people want as part of a project was meant to make them better, and unfortunately it was a grave error. Through a series of sociocultural, anthropological, and social studies, I came to realise that the people answering these questions were so conditioned by society’s structured consumerism that they all tended to want the same damn thing! Just as if, today, I went around asking people here in Italy what they wanted to see on television, their first response would probably be Maria De Filippi. Generally, people are deeply conditioned. That’s why I believe that before making a proposal to the masses or to the individual, it’s fundamental to remove these filters and show them the world through a new set of eyes, in a different way.

The Immersioni were the instruments I used to do this. Defining what is up, down, left, and right was no longer the question, because you were inside a ball or on an inclined plane that made you see things you’d never seen before. These instruments were created to prepare people. The role of the artist in that moment of history was not to improve society, but to break it and destroy the consumerism that society imposed—as a matter of fact, this situation still remains the same today. And this is how it should be. An artist must show and shed light on the things that aren’t beautiful to behold.