WORKS

The unsettling presentation of this “piece of city,” by now hard to identify as architecture, seems to confirm the correctness of the definition of Pettena made by a critic some years ago (Pietro Valle in Gianni Pettena. Le métier de l’architecte, Arch’it, 2002) as a “sower of signs” who “chooses to subject architecture to natural processes of transformation that undermine its permanence.” The intervention is now in fact less ironic and perhaps more tinged with pessimism, the forms more vague and abstract, but the intention is the same as the one that lay behind the works made out of ice, clay or bushes from the early part of his time in the United States. But Pettena seems to be deliberately carrying out an ever more profound reappraisal of the languages of architecture, using the instruments of art, with a continual semantic contamination that allows him to dramatize and accentuate the intentions of his early years.