IAKOV CHERNIKHOV INTERNATIONAL FOUNDATION (ICIF)

Was born in 1956 and studied architecture in Milan. Editor in chief of the magazine Abitare, he teaches urban design at the Milan Polytechnic and has been visiting professor at the Berlage Institute in Amsterdam. In 1989 he received his PhD from the IUAV, in Venice. His Milan-based Boeri Studio is active in urban design and architecture. His work has focused on the transformation of European urban areas and the forms in which different disciplines observe and represent the contemporary city. He has organized several interdisciplinary exhibitions and coordinated various research projects, among which the Uncertain States of Europe (USE) and Border Device(s), promoted by the Multiplicity research agency, a group of architects-urban planners founded by him. Curator of many exhibits throughout the world and of volumes such as Mutations, with Obrist and Koolhaas, he has designed installations reflecting the new urban status quo for the Paris IFA, the Venice Biennale and the Milan Triennale.

Curator statement

Stefano Boeri

The eye of the needle of local space
Manifesto for a new form of Localism

1.	Even if it may seem paradoxical, globalization has further emphasized the irreducible specificity of local spaces.

2.	Yet "local space" is not to be understood as a mere geographical context, or the localization of a determined object in a place of tradition and historical culture, but rather as a spatial (physical, mineral) device capable of concentrating structural tendencies that – developed locally –unfold at the moment in which external flows of transformation enter into contact with a determined territory.

3.	Even if moved by external and immaterial forces, any event that implies material transformation incites and intercepts this local device. And is inevitably conditioned by it. Local space acts, in other words, like the eye of a needle through which the thread of transformation must necessarily pass.

4.	International architecture must today be able to recognize and value this new form of "localism". This does not imply an opposition to global propensities but rather the need to absorb and regenerate these through the selective filter of local culture and its materials.

5.	This new perspective brings back into discussion the concepts of Regionalism and Context and introduces within the architectural realm the notion of Translation. As with language (often regenerated through neologisms), local architecture must receive the spaces produced by new social behaviours - as is the case world wide of new places of worship or commerce or of new forms of solitude and cohabitation – and translate them into the device of local space.

6.	Yet this translation is neither a simple reproduction "in style" nor a free interpretation. Contemporary architecture cannot become an Esperanto that cancels geographical differences or a sum of dialects that refuses contamination with the world.

7.	The eye of the needle of local space is a creative device that transforms global flows into fuel for regenerating places. It uses the whole world to build a place.

Стефано Боери