Looking from above Italy appears as a maculated body, a landscape with blurry spots and borders. Its ancient geographical features have been retouched by a liquid grain of urban matter, which has step over mountains, has invaded flat lands and has filled valleys. The Anti-city is generated by a molecular energy. It deletes borders between the city and the countryside, it writes the differences between center and suburb off and it fragments the urban society. The Anti-city is expanding everywhere, it transforms dramatically an inherited territory. This book helps us to understand a powerful political and social phenomenon, which concerns everyone. Because, if we like it or not, the Anti-city is us.

It collects and reedits a series of articles and essays written by Stefano Boeri in the last ten years, which have been published in national and international magazines, books and newspaper.

read the italian version.

Milan, like every city in the world, today, is at a crossroads. It can continue growing by eating up agricultural land, woods, natural space, and thus reducing biodiversity and the space available to other species. Or it can choose to become a bio-diverse metropolis, starting with a new agreement between the city, the natural world and agriculture.

Biomilano is a a glossary, a mosaic, which includes fragments from various disciplines and methodologies and practices which are mixed and variable. These range from ideas and projects linked to biology, architects, agronomists, politicians and ordinary citizens.

These entries are accompanied by highly-detailed illustrations which, alongside the text, create a ‘verbal-visual’ dictionary that sits at the border between utopia and reality. Seen together, these entries form a complex scenario, which is self-indulgent and often ironic, and which is re-assembled and put into visual context in the second part of the volume.

Only as we move away from the image of the Biomilano-city do things really come into focus, until the whole takes on the form of a place which, in many ways, is already amongst us.

Biomilano illustrates six projects – Global kitchen Gardens for Milan Expo 2015, Metrowood, Verical Forest, Wood House, Farms, Urban Ruralities – outlining the economic and territorial energies which are needed in order to arrive at a new balance between the urban sphere, rural areas (cultivated forms of nature) and the natural world.

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Published by Corraini Edizioni

Edited by Michele Brunello and Sara Pellegrini

The Anti-city, the risk of the disintegration of our urban societies, is not only a phenomenon linked to social exclusion and the stigma of rebellion. There is an Anti-city which is much more powerful and widespread and which every day changes the spaces where we live our lives, something which is breaking up our society, in Italy, in Europe and in many other parts of the planet. The Anti-city is not only that which emerges from the fact that too many similar kinds of lives are concentrated in spaces which are too alike, and where urban revolts explode, showing a total alienation from the urban condition. The Anti-city is a source of deep energy and is apparently peaceful, and it does not oppose itself to the cities where we live. It tends, on the other hand, to erode it from within. Without making big gestures, it moves quietly and often invisibly within the mechanisms of reproduction of contemporary urban space; it breaks down connections, and unties knots, it compromises the very workings of the city.

The Anti-city which worries us today is not born from exclusion or a sense of revolt, but from the fragmentation and dissipation of those vital energies which flow in every corner of urban life. This Anti-city does not grow through processes of concentration and closure, but rather in those where urban connections are diluted. It does not create an alternative to that city we have inherited from centuries of history, but is, if anything, a more recent version of it, something postmodern.
While it is part of contemporary life, the Anti-city co-exists with other historic forms of production in the city, with its important social and physical divisions linked to industrial modernity, the expansion related to the Renaissance era, the mono-centrism of  the medieval city. In order to develop, it has no need to destroy the physical legacy of the city, but tends, rather, to conquer it from the inside and reconfigure its spaces, erecting barriers and breaking them up.

The Anti-city is nothing other that the city which we are aware of and where we live; it is not a form of cancer and nor does it represent the death of the city. It is an underground city which has always flowed in the veins of every urban community. A river which collects urban energies linked to daily lives and pushes them towards individualism and fragmentations which, at times, explode.

Fragmentation does not mean an absence of community, the absence of rules, the absence of physical and social order. The vibrations of the Anti-city are born from within the need to “make the city”, the anti-bodies which work against the need of people to live together and to recognise themselves in those forms. And like all anti-bodies, those of the Anti-city have an important function: they help to avoid anonymity, the loss of identity linked to blood, race, culture, religion which the sharing of space can produce.

But there are episodes, periods and epochs when the Anti-city stops working as a necessary counterpart to those aggregative pulses which push forward urban society; it stops being a necessary break from the over homogenous nature of ordinary urban space, between one house and another, one neighbourhood and another and between one city and another. In these periods the Anti-city begins to dominate, it becomes all-powerful; it even sets the rules for daily life. Its energy – which is no longer contained or controlled by the power of links to neighbours, by density, by the urban condition – is freed up through a myriad of small activities, which dilute the value of human relationships and construct enclaves where there is no social or cultural variety. It weakens relationships between different communities and transforms differences of identity and culture into physical barriers. Today, we are living in one of these moments.

This is the time of big urban areas, the time when cities have had success on a global scale and the urban condition has become pervasive. But the global success of the political, economic, symbolic model of urban life, which is considered by everyone as the most efficient way to live in the world, runs the risk of undermining the essential aspects of the way the city is made. Often, in reality, it is the anti-urban values which are winning, with the accelerated speed or urban growth, the megalopolis created by unstoppable internal migrations, and the numerous edge cities produced by uncontrolled decentralisation.

In the period when the urban condition is winning, the Anti-city is building huge cities without borders across the world, places which are extending into those areas which were once used for agriculture or simply left to nature, and these new cities are made up of a number of mono-cultural islands which are uninterested in the workings of the geographical and anthropological organisation of which they are part.

Yet, even at this time, paradoxically, the Anti-city remains an essential part of the creation of the city. It cannot stop feeding off those energies which are pushing towards the coming together of spaces and social groups, in order to fragment and weaken them; those energies which bring people together and create links between them, which connect up identities and favour the sharing of experiences and daily practices.

For all these reasons, today more than ever, we need to understand the Anti-city in all its forms, and recognise these forms with clarity, while avoiding the temptation to see them not as part of our own lives. We need to understand where and how they work, what rules they follow, how they push themselves. Because we are the Anti-city: like it or not.

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Photo by Antonio Ottomanelli

A whole host of women and men of all ages who in the last 50 years have created the forms, images, efficiency and appeal of the objects we all use on a daily basis. A host of Italians, who hail from Piedmont, Liguria, Sicily, Lombardy, Lazio, Campania and Veneto, but who in their creative work, and in their ability to give symbolical and aesthetic value to everyday utensils, are, and have always been essentially Milanese. For it is around Milan that this host of innovators, the people behind the phenomenon that is Italian Design, have always revolved, geographically and spiritually.

And what better way to celebrate Abitare’s 50th birthday than to rally this host of remarkable, unconventional, restless individuals; show their faces and describe their work, despite the fact that we are well aware that we are only able to catalogue a small part of Italian design’s immense creative workshop. With the invaluable help of Marco Romanelli and Mia Pizzi, Abitare decided to analyse, one by one, those individuals that make up this group, and produce a chronological run-down of those people and their work with design.

We know, of course, that these are not the only people who should be cited when discussing the manufacturing, social and economic miracle that remains, to this day, the driving force behind this country and our balance of trade.

There is also the host of clients, industrialists, suppliers, small and medium-sized enterprises who should be mentioned: in short a whole other, unique set of people, the ones who have given material form to prototypes and products, turned designs into real things, ideas into actual objects, concepts into technological solutions, and revealed to the world what happens when enterprise takes up the challenges set by creative minds.

Then there is a third host: the objects themselves, all those complex, aesthetically pleasing products and utensils that have always filled the pages of magazines like Abitare, the showroom shelves, the furnishing stores, the rooms of our homes.

The host of creative minds presented in sequence on the pages that follow – which are organised by date of birth – would be nothing without these other two groups.

This issue of Abitare reflects for the ways in which, for each and every designer, their lives and experiences have intertwined with their clients as they have exchanged ideas regarding hopes and expectations for the product concerned.

But this is just the beginning. We are convinced that these pages do not just provide excellent subject matter for a 50th birthday celebration; they are also the first, crucial piece of a jigsaw that reconstructs the history of Italian design; another step towards finally building that “design museum” which we have been working on over the last few months with Enzo Mari.

During the 50 years of Abitare’s existence, which have seen a period of extraordinary growth in Italian creativity, and in the ability of firms to take risks and to innovate lifestyles, the architecture and design magazines have always selected what to present and analyse with care, patience and elegance, drawing on this great river of individuals, objects and places. They have looked at different approaches, choices, passions, idiosyncrasies, reactions, advices and sometimes serious critiques. Whether we like it or not, without Abitare and all the other enlightened Italian magazines, there would be no remarkable story to tell.

53 Editorial by Marco Sammicheli and Giovanna Silva
68 The Baghdad years by Zaha Hadid

THE TEACHER

72 A lecture at Penn University in Philadelphia
78 The University of Applied Arts in Vienna
83 The Parametric City by Patrik Schumacher

THE ARCHITECT

86 The exhibition on Suprematism in Zurich
90 Zaha Hadid and the Russian avant-garde by Paola Nicolin
94 The ZHA office in Clerkenwell
100 Zaha Hadid Architects office by Salottobuono
102 People and methods
106 Hans Ulrich Obrist interviews Zaha Hadid and Patrik Schumacher
112 The London Aquatic Centre: the construction site
118 The opening of the school in Brixton
128 Hommage à Zaha: Lord Palumbo
130 The Riverside Museum of Transport in Glasgow: the construction site

LA DIVA

138 Zaha Hadid home by Anniina Koivu
145 Hommage à Zaha: Rolf Fehlbaum

146 Zaha and fashion
151 Hommage à Zaha: Neil Barrett
152 Woman of the year
London Frieze Art Fair + Basel
A conversation with Craig Robins and Edwin Heathcote
159 Hommage à Zaha: Julia Peyton-Jones

THE ARCHITECT

160 The opening of MAXXI in Rome
169 Hommage à Zaha: Romeo Gigli
170 The Maritime Station in the harbour of Salerno: the construction site
176 The bridge named after Sheikh Zayed in Abu Dhabi: the construction site
184 Hommage à Zaha: Aaron Betsky
186 The Cultural Centre in Baku: the construction site
192 The opening of the Guangzhou Opera House
202 Hadid City by Salottobuono
204 1982-2011 projects by Salottobuono
208 Hommage à Zaha: Brian Clarke

This issue has been curated by Marco Sammicheli (text), Giovanna Silva (photography) and Mario Piazza (graphic design). With the editorial advisory of Maria Giulia Zunino and the collaboration of Alessia Pincini.

Front cover photo by Giovanna Silva

Presentation of Being Zaha Hadid - Abitare april issue at Politecnico di Milano on tuesday 12th 2011.