Palermo - Zen 2
For centuries Palermo was renowned for the extravagant beauty of the Conca d'Oro, the vast plain that surrounds the historic city. These landscape qualities were praised all over Europe through the longest stretch of the city’s extensive history. After the Second World War the narrative changed through a process of speculative growth involving an avalanche of concrete, devastating almost all the plain’s natural bounty. The housing project of Zen 2 was built in the climax of this havoc, designed as an architectural antedote used to push back against the forces of destruction. The designer was the star architect Vittorio Gregotti who employed as a design module an iconic agricultural building unit known as the baglio. This module was replicated with many variants to create a set of some twenty public housing pavilions held together in a dense grid. The archetype harkened to the area’s agricultural roots, a utopian aspiration thwarted by poor management and the iron grip of organized criminality which transformed Zen 2 into an infamous dystopia. These documents demonstrate the power of words and gestures to enact a condition of normality in the face of seemingly unsurmountable adversity.
