Germano Celant

In an encounter with Celant published by Interni (December 2009) at the time of the exhibition he curated on “Frank O. Gehry since 1997” at the Milan Triennale (September 2009 – January 2010), regarding the idea of architecture as a necessary practice of synergic convergence between art, entertainment and design practice, he stated: “My path as a critic and historian of the interaction between art and architecture began with my first collaboration in 1965 with the magazine Casabella, directed by Alessandro Mendini, where coming from the art world I began to cross the two languages, trying to find a point of contact. […] From 1980 onward the cross-pollination of the arts has become my practice of crossing of languages, leading to research on art & books, art & fashion, art & video, art & photography... concluding in the major exhibitions ‘Looking at Fashion’ in Florence in 1996, ‘Architecture&Arts 1900-1968’ in Genoa in 2004 and ‘Vertigo: a Century of Multimedia Art’ in Bologna in 2007. Nevertheless, the convergence between the arts already existed in all the historical avant-gardes, from Futurism to Constructivism, Neoplasticism to Surrealism, so the present episodes are simply a consequence and update of what, after Warhol, has become the full democratization between the languages of making and communicating. […] So for me architecture has always been an intertwining between art and this discipline of construction, where design practice is not just technical, but also subjective and intuitive, spectacular and communicative, creative and sculptural. [In this interpretation] the ‘spherical’ vision, a definition that belongs to the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, is an inevitable passage towards a modernization of perception. We no longer live according to simple coordinates, but ones that are marked by a civilization with a widespread technological structure”.

The concept of spherical vision is again applied by Celant in the introduction of an anthology of his writings on architecture and design – “Architettura + Design 1965-2015”, Quodlibet Editore, 2018: “The stance regarding space, to solve its functional and expressive quality, is resolved today through a project that does not see architecture and design as parallel, separate languages, but as integrated and almost coinciding. Both have extended into their counterparts, to implement a spherical vision in which objects blend with the environment and spaces are transformed into objectual communication”.