Salento Moderno – It’s a Question of Taste

‘Horror show’ was also the reaction of the Italian readership of a national newspaper to a gallery of images of related monuments, placed in the public spaces of cities and towns throughout Puglia. This scandalised public reaction was in fact one of the spurs to action by the Capo d’Arte and an editorial team of Italian academics, curators, researchers and photographers.

Also faced with the imminent prospect of some of these buildings’ demolition, to make way for the new gas pipeline from the Caspian Sea, the intrepid team promptly set about documenting, naming and – perhaps inevitably – finding value in a phenomenon that had been so roundly dismissed by the Italian public.

The curious irony is that it’s almost always the populace at large who are most dismissive of ‘popular’ culture. It’s up to intellectual elites and taste-makers to show us new ways of appreciating what we had previously dismissed as bilious blots. It was 35 years ago that Prince Charles – the zeitgeist having momentarily escaped him – famously attacked modern architecture as a ‘carbuncle’. His pustular polemic has not only survived but gained new impetus in ways of describing ugly buildings, and every year the ‘Carbuncle Cup’ is awarded to the unfortunate victor. Notwithstanding the Prince’s unexpected championship of the innate conservatism of the populace,

The extent of the turnaround is beautifully illustrated by Ernö Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower. The latter was the subject of J.G. Ballard’s terrifying dystopian masterpiece ‘High-Rise’ in 1975. Once considered an affront to architecture and the very epitome of horror, the tower is now a listed building, with anxious waiting lists of hopeful occupants. From carbuncle to national icon within a generation. Taste… whatever it is – it changes.

Interestingly the editorial team behind Salento Moderno have also clearly struggled with the business of ‘Taste’ in the treatment of their subject. Massimo Torrigiani with winsome passion asks:

He disarmingly continues: “Herein lies the distinctive factor: taste. The way of standing out from or joining in with others through specific aesthetic choices, using something – your own home – in a road where everyone knows it’s yours… A challenge for all tastes, our own first and foremost.

Salento Moderno is based on a fleeting concept: a response to which after endless conversations with those involved I still cannot give a univocal sense. Which is a good thing. Like that instinctive sympathy for the people and things that are looked over summarily, from top to bottom, only to be deemed immediately to fall short of the mark.”

It turns out that vanishingly little is known about these buildings – who built them, for whom and even why. Dating largely from the 50s, these small and structurally simple, 2-3 floor reinforced concrete houses were built by migrants returning from Northern Europe, where they had been forced to seek work.

Exposed rebars – so typical of the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East mindset – pragmatically leave open the possibility of future extensions and modifications. There are no innovations in construction methods, and curiously the interiors are largely unremarkable, however extravagant the exterior. These buildings stand out simply by virtue of the design and decoration of the external skin of their facades.

One cannot even say with certainty that these fascinating buildings were ‘designed’ in the usual deliberate and premeditative manner. Those responsible for them were anonymous architects or surveyors who – no doubt in collaboration with their clients – may even have given shape to them as they were being constructed.

– are just some of the adjectives and descriptions of this phenomenon by the editorial team; to which we may also add,

And their inherent ‘naivety’ may well be the key to understanding these buildings, not as ‘architecture’ (there really isn’t any) but art, or rather ‘outsider art’, otherwise know as ‘l’art brut’. ‘Outsider’ artists are typically untrained or self-taught individuals with no connection to the mainstream art world and its institutions.

First championed by Jean Dubuffet, some of these art makers – who worked instinctively and usually in isolation – created highly individualistic, eclectic and complicated structures. An interesting example is the quiet and retiring postman Ferdinand Cheval, with his remarkable Palais idéal, that is now recognised as a cultural landmark. Picking up stones whilst delivering letters, he would often diligently assemble them at night with oil lamps, to create his fantastical folly over a 33 year period.

But although the many and varied buildings of Salento Moderno may not be as fantastical nor as obviously appealing as the Palais idéal, they are nevertheless still follies, and – as such – not out of place in this region of Italy. Eclecticism and pastiche eccentricity is not in fact unusual in Puglia with its exceptionally rich canon of architectural styles, reflecting the tastes of its innumerable occupiers.

But although the many and varied buildings of Salento Moderno may not be as fantastical nor as obviously appealing as the Palais idéal, they are nevertheless still follies, and – as such – not out of place in this region of Italy. Eclecticism and pastiche eccentricity is not in fact unusual in Puglia with its exceptionally rich canon of architectural styles, reflecting the tastes of its innumerable occupiers.

Within a short drive of one another, you will therefore come across strange worlds of conical roofed ‘trulli’, the Greek-island-like ‘white city’ of Ostuni atop a hill, the buttery baroque magnificence of Lecce, Islamic and Venetian-gothic seaside towns, grand neo-classical palazzi, squat Norman castles and frothy Renaissance churches. And on top of all of that, in the 19th century, a newly enriched bourgeoisie liberally lavished a panoply of motifs from the region’s (and Italy’s) rich architectural songbook on their residences.

So there does appear to be some precedent and context for ‘Salento Moderno’.

Apart from Puglia’s architectural heritage, positioned as it is at one of the epicentres of the clash of civilisations, Matteo Poli has another explanation for this eccentricity.
“Salento’s climate is forgiving with any architectural folly” he explains, “just like in other contexts where the spirit has been left to develop free of technological limits, for example in much postmodern American architecture. Thermal bridges, energy inefficiency or waterproofing do not constitute a major problem.”

If most of us rush past these Italian carbuncles in a gadarene cultural panic, then what was it that attracted the editorial team of Salento Moderno? Part of the explanation appears to be both personal empathy and social justice.

As Torrigiani eloquently explains: “I have lived in these places and inhabited these houses… where my imagination first took shape; I grew up with those who built them… We were brought together by a sentiment of empathy with these single and double-family homes. With the desire of women and men, of fathers and mothers, to build new dwellings for their families.

With their desire for urbanity and modernity, in keeping with the present time, to break out of a state of poverty, of an archaic way of living. To change, yet without doing away entirely with ancient insinuations and inherited motifs. Houses built as desired. Singular and eccentric, be it in an understated or an over-the-top manner. Each in its own way. Projections of the idea that one wishes to give of oneself to the world, with one’s own taste, following one’s own leanings, one’s own ambitions. Liberties are taken, and right on the street side of the house at that: what a cheek.”

Torrigiani then takes up the mantle of social justice warrior: “Scorned by the élite, hankering after farmhouses, palazzos and villas, (these houses) are here given our full respect for once.” He continues, “One cannot but take the defence of the accused party.”

Interestingly the editors confide that the critical theory framework for defending the indefensible was provided by “the paradoxical bible” of G. K. Chesterton’s The Defendant. A relatively obscure collection of essays written by this convert to Catholicism, sought to defend a range of cultural horrors – from what we now describe as kitsch objects like china shepherdesses, to ‘ugly things’ and ‘penny dreadfuls’.

Chesterton’s concern to open our eyes to the wonder of creation unexpectedly also led him to be an apologist for popular culture. Inadvertently he appears to have developed a form of paradoxical critical theory before his time, that we now take for granted.

And once again, all roads lead to Rome, in that we always end up grappling with the vexatious business of taste, which as Stephen Bayley so astutely observed “is an elusive subject, since it is both a window and a mirror.” Therein is the rub: the editors of Salento Moderno – quite understandably – find themselves jumping through hoops to defend an authentic home-grown kitsch phenomenon, which had it been ‘ironic’, would not have needed defending.

The latter’s designs and art were deliberately calculated to offend. Even their efforts to subvert and offend quickly ended up being celebrated as mainstream cliché… another ‘school for historians to debate. How we judge something depends – it seems – not so much on its individual merits, but more on who made it and why. That’s how extraordinarily complicated our culture is.

But meanwhile, whilst we’ve had our heads buried in our navels, wily architects like Giacomo Garziano may have stolen a march on us all. Garziano’s transformation of his father’s house, a few miles north of Salento, down an unremarkable quiet residential street in Altamura, first nods at then evolves, with slick professional proficiency, the authentic anarchic kitsch individualism of the Salento Moderno phenomenon. It had to happen didn’t it? Matteo Poli must be right. There’s something in the air of Puglia.

From ‘Horror Show’ to mainstream culture (almost) within a generation. Taste… whatever it is – it changes.