Franco Audrito founds Studio65 in Turin in 1965, a group of avant-garde and experimentation gathering a team of artists, painters, photographers, aspiring filmmakers, all of them students at the Faculty of Architecture. Studio65 immediately becomes a circle in which these young people meet, discuss the liberation of man and the world from all forms of oppression; like all young people, they're so
much in love with life to be ready to fight to build a fairer world, in which imagination and freedom of expression can find their space and appreciation, rejecting the outside world: authoritarian, hypocritical, politically correct and opportunistic. So in 1967, Studio65 joins the rising student movement, bringing a critical design approach in the occupied Faculty of Architecture. No more proactive architecture, but architecture as demolishing art, the instrument of condemnation, of desecration, of mocking irony. With its degree in 1969, Studio65 starts its professional experience. Between 1969 and 1975, with its ironic and irreverent design, it actively participates in the revolution of costumes and architectural languages, in that liberation of creativity and imagination season, by interpreting the time of the change with objects (Bocca, Capitello, Mela etc...) and architectures still relevant to date, as symbols and witnesses of that revolution. The Bocca Sofa is designed in 1970, as a seat to be placed in the waiting area of the entrance hall at the "Conturella" Health Center in Milan. The design of the center, called the "Temple of Beauty", becomes the occasion, for Studio65, for an ironic reflection on the stereotyped beauty's consumer myth, built with commercial wisdom for the coated paper of fashion, beauty and glamour magazines. And the Bocca Sofa, even with its fleshy and sensual voluptuousness, becomes the symbol and the critical consciousness of a civilization that by favouring the aesthetic "Appearing" forgets the scale of "Being". In 1971 the Capitello chair is created, on the occasion of a seat design competition for Dupont. The Capitello chair aimss to debunk the myth of classicism, a myth that the West has taken to make of it a symbol of a civilization that for centuries ha subjected the world. And here, in the Capitello chair, made of soft polyurethane, the myth crumbles: this true ironic capital, taken from classical Greece, preserved in its design and proportions, is freed from the authoritarian and conceited anxiety, reclines on one side and entering the domestic space does not intimidate anyone, anymore. Vice versa, the discovery that this object, normally conceived in marble, is rather soft, raises a smile, gives one a thrill. In 1972 with the Eurodomus 72 in Turin, the Canella House interiors and the fitting out of the "Maison entrouvable" for Domus, Studio65 takes the opportunity to make an ironic reflection on the domestic spaces, on the consumerist myths of living. At the Eurodomus 72, around a "totem household appliance" resolves a "pentabidet" with 5 degrees of washing forming a circle around a throne-shaped toilet; the bed is the altar to sacrifice to Venus, the central built-in kitchen unit is Jupiter's brazier. Babylonia, a pedagogical and educational game for children, is also designed in 1972: an anti-education architectural proposal. It's a game aimed at the continuous discovery of unpublished existential and spacial reasons, through its abstract and symbolic forms stirs the imagination and the exercise of fantasy, encourage socialization, invites children to adopt always new and autonomous attitudes rather than inducing them to homologate within an ideological stabilized order. Adam and Eve's Mela Morsicata suggesting the never-ending repetition of the original sin; the Big Apple, the big green apple, symbol of the Pop season in New York, of the Beatles' records and of Magritte's paintings; the Micky, the chair of Mickey Mouse, a symbol of domestic power coming out of cartoons to overbearingly enter our daily lives, making a mockery of our myths of power within the family: they all belong to those years. In 1975, following the oil crisis and and a renewed outbreak of a widespread malpractice in the public managment of architectural projects in Italy, Franco and Nana Audrito, together with their colleagues of Studio65, decide to venture to seek work abroad, in search of places, where the architect is asked only to do good projects to make the world a better place and not to give in to lobbyst affiliations. The Middle East adventure begins this way. It will bring Studio65 to win competitions and build architectures in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Egypt, and the Russia, Indonesia, England, China and the UAE, moving through the languages of architecture in the world with the same freedom, imagination and curiosity of knowledge that had always animated it since its inception and throughout the time in Turin. Since 1975, many years have passed, so many projects carried out, competitions, exhibitions and international awards, pubblications and three monographs: the first in 1985 for the Electa editor: "Studio65", the second for "L'arca" editor: "Lo Studio65", and the third again for "L'arca": "Franco Audrito and the Studio65". Hundreds of people either in Italy and abroad have shared with Nanà and myself the worderful experience of Studio65, a life experience before a professional one, persisting in the belief that dreams can be designed and built, and they have ventured with us, with the curious look of a child, to discover the remote corners of the world. Franco Audrito
