8 architecture exhibitions to visit in the warm season

The 23rd International Exhibition of Triennale Milano, entitled “Unknown Unknowns” (“What we don’t know we don’t know”), is an opportunity to develop a collective reflection on the future, in the light of the profound fragilities – not only due to the pandemic – that characterize our time and in the awareness that we must expand our knowledge and change our role towards the planet. In charge of the exhibition is Ersilia Vaudo, astrophysicist and Chief Diversity Officer at the European Space Agency (ESA), together with the architect Francis Kéré who oversaw the installation. 

From Signe Hornborg (the first woman in the world to graduate in architecture in Helsinki in 1890), to Norma Merrick Sklarek (the first African-American to enter the profession in 1954), to Zaha Hadid (the first architect to receive the prestigious Pritzker Prize in 2004), through to emerging young architects such as Francesca Torzo and Lucy Styles, the exhibition recounts – through a historical narrative and an overview of the current international situation – the “feminine” evolution of the architectural profession over the last century. Curated by Pippo Ciorra, Elena Motisi and Elena Tinacci, with installation by Matilde Cassani.

With the “Nature” cycle, MAXXI investigates the explorations of contemporary architecture by inviting international masters to narrate their work through the installation of an exhibition. The seventh edition of “Nature” features the work of Mario Botta who, through models, sketches and photos, narrates his personal interpretation of “sacred and profane” in the broadest sense of a sacredness inherent in every architectural gesture, from the purity of the materials to sensitivity to the context. Curated by Margherita Guccione and Pippo Ciorra.

The Fundació Enric Miralles, with the support of the MITMA (Ministry of Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda of the Government of Spain) and in collaboration with the Real Academia de España en Roma, presents the exhibition “Plots of Memory” that tells – with sketches, models, drawings and reflections – some interventions over thirty years of the study EMBT in places of great historical value, under the banner of “continuity” between memory of the pre-existence and work ex novo. 

“Savage is the architecture that rejects the domestic man, refusing to impose the power of reason on its animal, symbolic, vital and therefore political dimension.” The exhibition presents the results of the research started in 2017 at the Royal College of Art in London by ADS10 – Architecture Design Studio 10, the experimental laboratory of Gianfranco Bombaci, Matteo Costanzo, Francesca Romana Dell'Aglio and Davide Sacconi that addresses in a multidisciplinary way the themes of architectural design, anthropological investigation, didactic experimentation and curatorial practices. The exhibition proposes a reflection on the reasons for contemporary architecture and sees in the archive – understood as a set of objects, documents and information – the essential tool of a radically critical approach towards the current situation and proposing alternative scenarios. Curated by CAMPO.

At the Pecci Center is staged an immersive exploration into the work of the group 9999, an exponent of Radical Architecture in the period between ’68 and the American counterculture movement, which through imaginative travel has developed ante litteram an ecological thought able to overcome the dichotomy “nature-culture” through the use of technology.

Hosted in the exhibition gallery of the IUAV University of Venice, the exhibition dedicated to Aldo Rossi’s Theatre of the World recounts, through the images of Antonio Martinelli, all the stages of the brief life of the iconic floating wooden theater, evocative of the thousand-year history of the lagoon city, from its construction in Porto Marghera to the journey to Venice, from the crossing of the Adriatic Sea with Dubrovnik as its destination to its return and dismantling.

The Pilotta hosts, from March 18 to July 31, 2022, a major exhibition – curated by Simone Verde with Bruno Adorni, Carla Campanini, Carlo Mambriani, Maria Cristina Quagliotti, Pietro Zanlari – dedicated to the patronage of the Farnese family, with the aim of investigating the extraordinary affirmation of the family in the European political and cultural structure between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries through the use of the arts. More than 300 works, including paintings, objects, project drawings, documents and models from Italian and European collections – a heterogeneous corpus never brought together before – recounts in great detail the richness of Farnese collecting.