Authenticity and project
What was women’s contribution to the culture of the project in the 20th century? In terms of professional recognition, it has, more often than not, received a kind of belated, if not posthumous, compensation. Both the history of women and the rediscovery of their architecture and design archives date from the mid-1970s, but their paths have only crossed recently and still amid endless difficulties.
So it has proved for Marta Lonzi (1938-2008), an architect and highly original advocate of Italian feminism. She took part from the start with her sister Carla – a leading exponent of feminism in Italy, an art critic and the discoverer of the artistic avant-garde of the 1960s – in establishing Rivolta Femminile (Rome 1970) and the subsequent foundation of the publishing house of the same name in Milan in 1971. A passionate essayist and militant publisher, Marta was a sensitive designer on an urban scale, refined in the creation of interiors. Advocating a creative process that was not antithetical to pre-existing buildings, she proposed an architecture based on awareness and relationships. A position that in many ways anticipates contemporary lines of research, not only in architecture: her reflections and proposals were also part of the vast horizon of the most contemporary feminist thought.
In a rich path of insights and practices deeply involving both the existential and the professional dimension, she revealed that not objectivity but authenticity validates the proposition devised by the architect:
“This value unhinges... every expedient of sublimated relationship with the object, because it imposes a real relationship with the object, but before all else a real relationship with oneself.”
“Today, the architect is stuck at a stage where he is at one with what he develops. Having allowed the subjective and therefore conscious relation between himself and the object to decline, he resides immanent in the project he presents in objective terms, believing them illusorily to be true. This tautological spiral of design leads to the decline of the process and, therefore, of the object: no longer architecture, but cubature; no longer cities with a human dimension, but periphery, meaning soulless agglomerations; no longer territorial integrity, but fracture.” (Autenticità e progetto, 2006).
Authenticity: a key word in the feminist lexicon that Marta, more than thirty-five years after starting the exploration of self-awareness, uses as a litmus test to reread the history of architecture in search of ethical connotations. But it is an expansive process from the subject to its practices which now concern the entire social body.
