Vesper No. 6 | Magic | Spring-Summer 2022
Andrea Gritti
From
Florence to “Psicon”. Chronicles of a Journey within and around
Architecture
The nine issues and the two notebooks published in Florence by the
international architecture magazine “Psicon” are the main evidence
of a cultural enterprise that was suspended in circumstances similar to those
that had fostered it. Between the end of the 1960s and the second half of the
1970s, the Faculty of Architecture of Florence found itself at the centre of an
impassioned movement of college professors, who, during the student protests,
had initiated experimental research or, on the contrary, had been forced to
stop. Among the professors, rescued from the didactic paralysis of the Faculty
of Architecture of Milan Polytechnic and recruited by the Florentine
university, were Eugenio Battisti and Marcello Fagiolo, who, in the summer of
1974, joined Marco Dezzi Bardeschi to start an ‘ingenious’ and
‘fruitful’ editorial project. Stimulated by singular and fortunate
circumstances, the three founded the “Psicon” cooperative and the Ouroboros
study centre. The emblem they chose to seal their partnership was the
Piranesian version of the ‘snake king’, in which the reptile biting
its tail crosses the tools of the artist: a compass, some charcoal, a quill,
and a paintbrush.
download the contribution in open access >>
contacts
t. +39 041 257 1542