ABSTRACT
In a photograph from Ugo La Pietra’s archive, republished in the book Abitare la citta in 2011, the artist sits on a bench with two colleagues —Livio Marzot and Giuseppe Spagnulo—observing the construction of high-rise residential buildings in Milan’s periphery. Like Francesco Somaini and Mauro Staccioli, La Pietra and Franco Summa understood the modern Italian city—with its austere buildings and dysfunctional infrastructure—as fundamentally alienating to its inhabitants. La Pietra’s oeuvre traversed art, architecture, and design, as he was fascinated with the demarcations between public and private spheres and the opportunities to collapse them. In Per incontrarsi made in 1973 with the assistance of his students from the Liceo Artistico in Pescara, he painted on the bridge of the Ponte Risorgimento a sequence of black and blue legs in apparent motion. Summa described the image as a ritual procession.
