area 100 | changing cities

location: Graz, Austria

Art and architecture have, in history, always been closely bound by a single urban destiny associated with the presence of monuments. Modernity, with its dogmatic goals defined for design, as solutions to the needs and functionality of living, has often banished aesthetic and expressive research from the city, creating a gap in the course of the Twentieth century that it is hard to bridge. A new competition between cities, as well as the need to launch urban marketing and communication strategies that are visible and can be communicated to the world, have reintroduced the themes of exceptionality and the extraordinary, amazing and iconic character of new spaces or buildings where both the languages of architecture and the expressive codes characteristic of the figurative arts are used indistinctively.