Architects have lost control of city design according to Rem Koolhaas, who says the gap between the profession's rhetoric and the reality is wider in Italy than anywhere else.
Speaking at a conference during Milan design week, the OMA founder said that Italy was "tortured" by this situation.
"The architecture profession thought not so long ago that it knew how to design cities and that its obligation was to design cities and to teach how to design cities," he said.
"At the same time, we are surrounded by cities that you would call unpleasant," he continued. "Nobody can design cities anymore, or rather the cities that people know how to design are completely different from the cities that architecture considers legitimate and organised." "So, whether we want to or not, we are basically confronted with a phenomenal amount of evidence of the redundancy and even the absurdity of our profession. It's a really deeply tragic situation."
This is true everywhere, he said, but especially so in Italy, where the situation is "really more traumatic than anywhere else".
"Your entire country is tortured by this condition, because it is the one country that cannot make this step to another field, and no single Italian has written about anything which is not Italian in that sense," he said.

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