Living in the City, Ugo La Pietra / Sophie Delhay

The Sophie Delhay Studio is pleased to welcome Ugo La Pietra, live on zoom, for a discussion as part of the spring semester 2023 - La ville comme une maison. 

Ugo La Pietra, an artiste, architect and designer, was a major figure on the radical scene of the 1960s and 1970s. From the early 1960s he was interested in the experiments of the Viennese architects (Hollein, Pichler…) and worked to break down the separations between forms and disciplines through drawing, painting and architecture by exploring the theme of the “synesthesia of the arts.” In 1967, Ugo La Pietra became more radical in his critic of functionalism, which, according to him, asphyxiated the individual. He developed an “unbalancing system,” which, through the use of objects, audiovisual environments and immersions, aimed to broaden the field of human perception and to make the viewer an active participant. In the 1970s, urban zones became the focus of his attention. Equipped with “deciphering tools,” he surveyed the city down to its tiniest interstices in a quest for “degrees of liberty.” The artist methodically reappropriates and reinterprets urban space utilizing photography, film, drawing and photomontage. For him, we weave the city through our behaviors and our choices: “Inhabiting the city means being at home everywhere.”

The architectural fragment designed for Milan Triennale in 1996, symbolically and allusively represented various things from the slogan Living in the city that is the theoretical and project foundation of La Pietra’s work in the urban space: breaking the barrier between public and private space (inside/outside), reinventing decoration to endow architecture with meaning (the culture of making / craft culture), and the impossibility of impacting on reality with created works (the ephemeral design / the interrupted design).