Detours

DETOURS focuses on architecture of the recent past, on nineteen-sixties buildings. During this decade—a period in which the most crucial postwar reconstruction work had been completed—architects sought to develop a fitting expression of the vibrant economic and cultural scenes. This study zeroes in on a specific region: northern Italy, where the approach to creating architectural form spawned a considerable number of idiosyncratic and distinctive buildings. It takes a fresh look at the legacy of modernism and documents buildings in their present condition. The title designates both a work process (a discursive viewing of paradigmatic buildings) and a way of traveling (on roundabout paths off the beaten track of modernism).
The buildings mirror a wide range of nineteen-sixties themes and concepts. Their common denominator, however, is the general tendency to turn away from orthodox modernism. With the designs for these ten projects the architects—unfazed by the insistence on formal and structural clarity typical of academic circles—embrace ambiguity, or, in other words, seek to create manifestations of formal and structural complexity.