Since the 1970s, the exhibition curator, critic, theoretician, designer and teacher, Franco Raggi, has been cultivating a conceptual attitude involving a critical observation and questioning of languages and functions, typical of the Italian radical movement. His drawings (Ligne du temps, 1973; Temple-roulotte, 1974; Valise des styles, 1976) show a desire to transgress all the linguistic conventions of architecture and design. By using irony and paradox, they establish unforeseen links between opposing and primary concepts: his work plays on the ambiguous taboo involving the relation between form and function, translating it rather into a form-language relation, typical of a desire to take into account experiences outside the field of architecture, from the visual arts to theatre, and from graphic design to interior design. In 1978, he presented his work as part of the exhibition Topologie et morphogenèse, devised by Lara Vinca Masini for the Venice Biennale: “What interests me is the conceptual and physical overlay of the useful and the useless, the stable and the nomadic, the hard and the soft, the norm and its violation”. His graphic works, objects and projects thus explore the ambiguity and self-referentiality of languages in architecture.
Franco Raggi obtained his degree in architecture in 1969 at the Polytechnic School in Milan, the city where he currently lives and works. In the early 1970s, after working in the Nizzoli Associati agency, he joined the editorial board of the magazine Casabella as a writer and as a theoretician of the avant-gardes of radical European and American architecture. In 1973, he was involved in the foundation of Global Tools, a system of workshops focusing on individual creativity. He taught at Pescara University (1985-1986), and at the European Institute of Design in Milan (1989-2000). Since 2001, he has been teaching interior design at the Instituto Superiore per le Industrie Artistiche (ISIA) in Florence, and continuing his activities in the field of design and architecture.
