Beyond Environment

Beyond Environment presents the potent interchange between architecture, Land Art, and Performance Art that emerged through Italian architect Gianni Pettena s idealized collaboration with American artists Allan Kaprow and Robert Smithson in the 1970s. Captivated by a journey to the USA in 1971, Pettena would converse with the American Midwest, a conversation culminating in his meeting with Robert Smithson in Salt Lake City. Earlier in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Pettena s experiments in material trans- formations helped create some of the architect s most iconic works. Staged in an abandoned school and in a non-descriptive suburban house, and titled Ice House I and II, Pettena would pour water into the mold works he created around the buildings perimeter walls. Curing during the winter night to a coat of ice, the houses resonated with their conceptual predecessor, Kaprow s Fluids of 1967, as well as with an incomparable contemporary architectural sensibly concerned with the effects of variedly compounded, highly eidetic architectural surfaces. — Testi: Piccardo Emanuele, Wolf Amit. F.to: 14,5x20,5; pagg. 176; COL; rileg. brossura. Editore: Actar, Barcelona, 2014.