Gianni Pettena

Gianni Pettena (1940-), Italian architect and designer, has left a very important contribution to the development of Radical Design in Italy. A fine theoretician, he has assumed particular importance above all for his critical and academic activity that has made him rise to the role of bard and interpreter par excellence of Radical Design. A native of Bolzano, he studied architecture during the 1960s in Florence, then the creative epicentre of great intellectual and social ferments of which Pettana himself would also be a protagonist, so much so that he defined himself with a happy play on words as an “anarchitect” (this is the title of one of his most famous essays, published in 1973): during the course of his career, most of his projects will never take concrete form, remaining by choice at the level of installations or performances, straddling the world of conceptual art that he loved so much. A declared enemy of all modernist rationalism, Pettana is the author of anti-projects that are ephemeral by nature, often infused with a pioneering ecological sensitivity and focused on the relationship between man and nature. His most famous creation in the field of product design, the Rumble modular sofa (1967, produced at the time by Gufram and re-edited today by Poltronova), dates back to his student years, before his graduation in 1968. In the early 1970s he was the protagonist of a long tour in the United States and then returned to Florence to devote himself to teaching. From 1973 to 1975 he was one of the animators of the Global Tools experience, a sort of “Radical Design school” that aimed to promote individual and collective creativity. Pettena then held the position of professor of History of Contemporary Architecture at the Faculty of Architecture in Florence for many years, until 2008, also teaching in the 1980s for some periods at the Domus Academy in Milan and at California State University in the United States. A radical to the core, unlike many of his colleagues from his youth he always refused to move to Milan to work as a designer for large-scale industry.