143 GENOA WATER POWER
Innovative museums, alleyways alive with creativity, experimental theatre, and the sea as a project. The city with the ancient lighthouse is a beacon of change
THE ITALIAN BERLIN Italo Calvino said «there are two kinds of Ligurian: those who remain attached to their own place like limpets on a rock and that you’d never be able to shift; and those for whom the world is their oyster and wherever they are is like being at home. But even those in the second category come back home on a regular basis». The Genoese architect Renzo Piano, winner of the 1998 Pritzker Prize, has designed landmark buildings all over the world, but has always had Genoa in his heart; he describes it as a magical city where everything, even elephants, flies in the air ‒ including the ships ‒ which seem to fly whilst floating. His most recent tribute to his native city, where he still has his main office, is called Blueprint. Blueprint isn’t so much a master plan as a vision he has given as a present to the city, free of charge: a design for the new waterfront, his contribution to the future of Genoa. Presented last September on behalf of the Renzo Piano Building Workshop, its feasibility awaits definition. It’s a project that takes in all of the enormous area of Genoa’s ‘seaport-factory’ that extends eastwards from the Porto Antico, the historic seaport that Piano also replanned in 1992 for the Christopher Columbus celebrations. As he pointed out at his presentation «Blueprint isn’t a gift; rather it’s my simple way of participating in a city I never forget, because Genoa keeps hold of you for your whole life. My idea is to make the sea come into the foreground again, to make Genoa rediscover its relationship with the water and become even more beautiful. But Blueprint isn’t a book of dreams. It’s based on a very simple idea: to bring water back to where water used to be». And water is what it’s all about, because Genoa and the sea are a passion from which not many escape. Another Genoese architecture firm, OBR (Open Building Research), given an honourable mention in 2011 AR Awards for Emerging Architecture at RIBA, the Royal Institute of British Architects in London, has put forward a proposal for redesigning the Lido of Genoa. And for the Milanese art director Maurizio Maselli, who has chosen Genoa as his base in which to work, this city is all about the water: «the Capolungo area at the extreme edges of the Parco di Nervi is the best place for diving into the sea. Or if you can’t do that because of the weather, there’s the Piscine Albaro, a little masterpiece of the 1930s designed by Paride Contri: a blue rectangle of fresh water surrounded by a sky that you see through the windows». Paolo Musso, from Mentelocale, describes the splendid Boccadasse, an ancient village of Albaro that is the new centre of Genoese nightlife. And Ilaria Bonacossa, the Director of Villa Croce, has chosen her own favourite place in which to swim, the Sillo baths at Sori: «with its old timber posts sunk into the water it’s almost like being in another world». Writing about Genoa, Mark Twain said: «I would like to remain here. I had rather not go any further».
ARCHITECTURE The Museum of Villa Croce is a neoclassical building that directly overlooks the sea from the greenery of the park at Nervi. The permanent collection brings together 3000 works, including the Maria Cernuschi Ghiringhelli Bequest. Under the directorship of the 43-year-old Milanese Ilaria Bonacossa, who came here in 2012 after spending 11 years in Turin as director of the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Villa Croce acts as a point of observation that’s committed to intercepting international talents like the artist Marguerite Kahrl, who until 12 June will be showing her «Malthusian Matter, the ecology of little invasions»: a small army of ‘noble savages’ that refer obliquely