BACK HOMEPAGE ARCHITECTURE PAINTING PHILOSOPHY FOUNDATION

B.1.4.17
FLORENTIA
THE DAWNING CITY
by
VITTORIO MAZZUCCONI		 An Idea for the Murate
 
Florence 1970 - 85
 
Contest for the Murate


Index THE DAWNING CITY

Italiano

 
 

Project for the Murate:
Axonometric view

 
The Dawning City project is evidently utopia, but not because it proposes absurd ideas or because its fulfilment is impossible. On the contrary: the project's ideas are very reasonable, both on a philosophical level and on its punctual correspondence to the facts. Furthermore, the realisation of these ideas would be, technically speaking, more than feasible, as the project demonstrates with great accuracy. Financially speaking, the enterprise would not appear impossible, and it would be very easy to find people willing to sponsor it the world over. The authentic difficulty, the true utopia, would be, rather, to believe that in the tangle of back mentality, stiffened culture, provincialism, muddled laws and bureaucracy (which, unfortunately, is typical of Florence and, to be honest, of the rest of Italy also), it would be possible to back up a project so sensible, innovative and rich of extraordinary outlooks for the city's future. And, alas, this impossibility is so great that Mazzucconi himself has taken the hassle of proving it by participating in a Contest for the Murate area. If the idea of realising the Dawning City in an area already occupied by Nineteenth-Century buildings appears to be utopia (but why must this always be so? Is it not right to renovate a city? Did not the same thing occur one hundred years ago, when the old centre was demolished?), here then, at a short distance, there is a vacant area. There is an already operative decision that may allow a very impor-tant experience for Florence. Therefore, Mazzucconi proposes to realise the Dawning City at the Murate, the very same idea, which at the same time complies with all the Contest-programme requisites: that is to say, the creation of an International Centre of Art and Culture open to young people of all the world. In the project we also find the layout of the Carduus and the Decumanus, as if there were to be a new and fecund re-foundation, as well as the Forum, the Flower, the Temple, etc. Yet the project was readily discarded and labelled a 'visionary utopia'! It is so difficult to prove the opposite, in other words that the true reality is actually that which is revealed in a vision, when this vision bears both truth and beauty!