in mostra dal 1 dicembre 2011 al 29 aprile 2012

Gallerie 1, 2 e Sala Carlo Scarpa

a cura di Pippo Ciorra

La pratica del riciclo come “uno dei massimi generatori di innovazione creativa”.

È RE-CYCLE. Strategie per l’architettura, la città e il pianeta, la grande mostra che il MAXXI Architettura dedica a uno dei temi principali del terzo millennio, quello del riciclo dei materiali di scarto.

In mostra oltre 80 opere tra disegni, modelli, progetti di architettura, urbanistica e paesaggio, in dialogo continuo con opere di artisti, designer, video maker, con ampi sconfinamenti verso produzioni musicali e televisive.

Il risultato è un viaggio interdisciplinare attraverso opere di natura e provenienza diverse, tutte però accomunate dal riuso creativo dello scarto.

La mostra si espande all’esterno del museo con due installazioni site specific: il progetto Maloca dei designer brasiliani Fernando e Humberto Campana (che giovedì 1 dicembre alle ore 21 incontreranno il pubblico in occasione di MAXXINWEB) e il padiglione officina roma in materiale riciclato del collettivo tedesco.

Inoltre, nella Sala Carlo Scarpa, al piano terra, la mostra fotografica Permanent Error di Pieter Hugo: 27 scatti che raccontano attraverso ritratti inquietanti un’apocalittica, enorme discarica tecnologica in Ghana. Pieter Hugo incontrerà il pubblico del museo mercoledì 30 Novembre, alle ore 18:00, al MAXXI B.A.S.E. (ingresso libero).

www.fondazionemaxxi.it

© Andrea Martiradonna

Gio Ponti states that modern architecture cannot avoid taking into consideration solutions to socially-committed themes; certainly the Ifdesign project relating to the new NOIVOILORO cooperative site fully responds to this founding assumption, conducted from “the bottom up” as out-and-out voluntary work.

The first modern architecture – in reply to the rapid evolution of the new social needs – sought for the “typical” solution, by emphasising the general features of the building and often taking into account the location and the circumstances like mere “accidents”. Ida Origgi and Franco Tagliabue work in the opposite direction: beginning with the particular requirements requested by the commissioning client and from the constraints of a specific location, they build an “open” project, that is capable of growing and developing over time starting from a large common space.

Just like some rural constructions built around a barnyard or a medieval monastery around a cloister, simple buildings aggregate around a large central courtyard, that represents a common area open to the different forms of sociality stimulated by the cooperative: parties, shows, sports or recreational activities.

However, special reference is made to “timeless” models of settlement – or to sophisticated experiences of “minor” modern architecture, such as the quotation of the church roof by Sigurd Lewerentz in Björkhagen – without devaluating the decisive “contemporary” dimension of the project. The materials and the colours of the facades, the external and sometimes playful use of graphic art, the presence of continuous inventions of details make the building a kind of story with parallel episodes, that come together only in the overall bird’s eye view of such. From here, one can see how the building and the open space that it embraces show that deep relationship with the orography of the landscape, which historical settlements have always had: a relationship based on the transparency of its purposes and on the economy of means, that makes architecture the development of spaces that welcome the life of man rather than the production of virtual images to be re-broadcasted by media.

Cino Zucchi

(panel presented at the exhibition “The Architecture you like©”, MAXXI Museum, Rome, 24 February-10 May 2011)

by Antony Moulis

The State Library of Queensland re-design by Donovan Hill (in association with Peddle Thorp Architects) completed in Brisbane, Queensland in 2006 is, for me, an architecture of great promise. The project has been a popular success, being something like a “termite’s nest” with a broad and diverse set of spaces and activities that create a sense of active public space within a previously insular institutional setting.

A critical aspect of the building’s form is its re-creation of domestic style space within public space. In a country such as Australia where domestic architecture is predominant in cultural terms, the “domestication” of public institutions is a way to have people feel “at home” in a city where the suburbs offer the main form of living. At the same time the building does not “talk down” to its public but seeks to engage it in playful ways. There are aspects of the building that recall the work of Alvar Aalto and his attempts to “humanise” architecture and public space. These values are important to a culture at the other fringe of the world that is dominated by an open and vast landscape that dwarfs attempts to make architecture at a similar scale. I like this building because it signals a new beginning for public space as an open experiment beyond the settings of Europe and America where such cultural questions about public space are usually answered through the repetition of, or reaction to, conventionally understood architectural forms. With the main interior actually being exterior space there is a delightful ambiguity to experience here. The sense of being enveloped in the larger landscape and the benign climate is ever present.

Yet the recent dramatic floods that engulfed Brisbane also inundated the building, breaking the fragile truce between nature and architecture that so strongly characterises this vast continent.

critical text by Joseph Grima

Flipping through an architecture magazine or clicking through the feed of one of the countless architecture blogs online today, it quickly becomes evident that contemporary architectural production suffers from a chronic case of hyperinflated personality syndrome (a pathology which causes buildings and their authors to engage in an agonistic rivalry for the limelight, both within the city and within the collective consciousness of its inhabitants).

Pondering the possible causes, one is tempted to suspect that the addiction to public attention is in fact a consequence of the profession’s marginalisation: few times in history have architects had as little influence on the form of the urban landscape that surrounds them as in the last two or three decades of developer-driven urban expansion. Little wonder that when they actually do get to shape a portion of the city – something that is entirely the exception and not the norm – the primary ambition is to project a larger-than-life personality, to create a strident landmark that compensates for a general sense of impotence over its context.

Even in the days when ambitions were greater and the belief that serving society was possible endured, a top-down attitude to planning and urbanism doomed many projects at best to formal alteration and at worst to demolition. Le Corbusier’s dwellings in Pessac were customised beyond recognition by their working-class inhabitants, much to their author’s chagrin; Stirling, Kikutake et al’s housing in Previ (Lima, Peru) suffered a similar fate, given that the integrity of formal compositions designed by members of Team X held little value when the need to add an extra room arose.

Quinta Monroy is therefore doubly exceptional. Not only does it renounce formal ambitions of any kind, but it actually bows to the inevitable and embraces the change its inhabitants will inevitably desire. It is an architecture-as-framework, a support structure that renounces its own personality in favour of its inhabitants’. If, as a profession, we genuinely aspire to become even remotely relevant in shaping the landscape that surrounds them, we would do well to consider architecture as a service to society rather than a vehicle for our vanity.

***

Sfogliando una rivista di architettura o cliccando in uno degli innumerevoli blog di architettura online oggi, appare ben presto evidente che la produzione architettonica contemporanea soffre di una sindrome cronica da personalità megalomane (una patologia che fa sì che gli edifici e chi li ha concepiti siano impegnati in una rivalità agonistica nella ricerca della ribalta, sia all’interno della città che all’interno della coscienza collettiva dei suoi abitanti).

Riflettendo sulle possibili cause di tale fenomeno viene il sospetto che la dipendenza nei confronti dell’attenzione pubblica sia una conseguenza della marginalizzazione della professione dell’architetto: poche volte nella storia infatti gli architetti hanno avuto così poca influenza sulla forma del paesaggio urbano che li circonda come negli ultimi due o tre decenni di espansione urbana guidata dagli agenti immobiliari. Allora c’è poco da meravigliarsi se, quando devono disegnare una porzione di città – cosa che è assolutamente l’eccezione e non la regola –, l’ambizione primaria sia quella di proiettare una personalità esagerata, di creare un oggetto isolato che compensi un senso generale di impotenza verso il suo contesto.

Persino nei giorni in cui le ambizioni erano maggiori e la fiducia che servire la società era possibile, un siffatto approccio alla progettazione e all’urbanistica dominava molti progetti, traducendosi nel migliore dei casi in alterazioni formali e nel peggiore in demolizioni. Le abitazioni di Corbusier a Pessac erano personalizzate a tal punto dai loro abitanti della classe operaia da non essere riconoscibili, con gran delusione del loro ideatore. Le case di Stirling, Kikutake e altri a Previ (Lima, Peru) hanno avuto un destino simile, visto che l’integrità delle composizioni formali progettate dai membri del Team X ebbe poco valore quando sorse l’esigenza di aggiungere una camera extra.

Quinta Monroy pertanto è doppiamente eccezionale. Non solo rinuncia a qualsiasi tipo di ambizione formale ma si inchina all’inevitabile e abbraccia i cambiamenti che i suoi abitanti inevitabilmente desidereranno apportare. È un’architettura-scheletro, una struttura di supporto, che rinuncia alla sua personalità a favore dei suoi abitanti. Se, a livello professionale, aspiriamo genuinamente a esercitare una seppur remota influenza sul disegno del paesaggio che li circonda, faremmo meglio a considerare l’architettura come un servizio alla società piuttosto che come un veicolo della nostra vanità.

The text is presented at the exhibition L’architettura che ti piace©/The architecture you like© opened at MAXXI, Rome until 15th May 2011. Info www.fondazionemaxxi.it

Il testo è presentato alla mostra L’architettura che ti piace©/The architecture you like© visitabile al MAXXI di Roma fino al 15 maggio 2011. Info www.fondazionemaxxi.it

Milano, 25 luglio 2011