Italian radical experimentation around the night-club.

Warhol-McLuhan-Price and the electrical architecture of the 60’s

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RITA #03 (pp.112-119). Blind peer reviewed. Ed.RedFundamentos Madrid. ISSN: 2340-9711. April 2015

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The second half of the 60s, that convulsed generator experiences long revisited period, also witnessed a curious phenomenon in Italy that, linked to the American booming nightlife and an intense climate of social emancipation, use these new “ fun palaces “ as a source of ideological inspiration when perceived among young Italian radical architects and designers as a stylistic and functional experimental laboratory capable of generating models for a new social order linked to entertainment.
The fruitful intensity of these years resulting multitude of proposals in which architecture acts as a catalyst for a social drive that mixes in the same space the most radical cultural and experimental art with mass phenomenon in the society of the spectacle, allowing leisure industry occupy without complexes a key position in the discourse of a new generation who intentionally transfers it’s interest from the built form to the production of electronically amplified artificial environments while demonstrating its commitment to the methods and logic of new technologies.

KEYWORDS: Andy Warhol, E.P.I., night-club, counterculture, amplified environments, Marshall McLuhan, Cedric Price, Leonardo Savioli, Radical Architecture, Piper Club Phenomenon.