What?
LABB is a multi-venue festival that will take place in and around Bergamo and Brescia and in the places of transformation along the River Oglio.
It is organised around three main guidelines, starting with the increasingly topical words of Gio Ponti, who wrote in 1957 in his ‘little book of architecture’: ‘Love Architecture for its fantastic, adventurous and solemn creations… Love it for the immense, glorious, age-old human endeavour that it bears witness to with its cathedrals, palaces and cities, its houses, and its ruins’ (Gio Ponti, Amate l’Architettura. L’Architettura è un Cristallo, 1957).
THE THREE GUIDELINES
Inherit. LABB is an opportunity to promote the legacy of post-war architecture, built between 1945 and 1980, through the recognition of its buildings and the dissemination of their values, past and present.
By analysing and informing the general public about what determined the artistic strength of 20th-century Italian architecture, people will be more aware of the example of beauty that these works have in the world. There are 97 buildings to be examined, 37 of which are located in the Brescia area and 60 in the Bergamo area. They are already included in the Census of Italian Architecture of the Second Half of the 20th Century. From them, genes or hereditary factors can be identified so that they may be preserved and shared as examples for future urban transformations.
Know. LABB is a learning and education project, which involves the organisation of workshops, seminars and public meetings to share and explore examples of best practices.
The first part of the festival will be held over four days, alternating between Bergamo and Brescia each day, named: “Bergamo-Brescia Calls Europe”.
Urban transformations of the recent past, the present and the future will be looked at and organised according to scale.
On the final, fifth day, the events in both cities will be dedicated to the MACRO scale and thus to projects which involve the transformation of large parts of the city.
Alongside the large-scale topics, organised jointly with the University of Bergamo and the University of Brescia, space will be given to the MICRO scale, which will be talked about and debated with politicians, the stakeholders involved, architects and the public. Projects carried out in the province, which are small in size but which have had important, inherent regenerative capacities, will be selected.
Protect. LABB looks to the future starting from knowledge about and research on the present and the past, with the awareness that the alliance between professionals and citizens is one of the indispensable bases for the protection and preservation of historical heritage and its transformation.
For this reason, a moment of collective discourse will take place in the form of talks, metaplans and nominal groups, three operational tools which make it possible to share information and opinions, and which enable the community of participants to become more aware of the issues at hand, from environmental sustainability to the economy to society. The results of these discussions will be collected in a final document that will form the basis of the first LOVEARCHITECTURE2023 charter: on the last day of the event, It will be submitted to local public policy makers and national government representatives.