ROMA NOVISSIMA. CONTEMPORARY DIRECTIONS OF ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN IN ROME

Roma Novissima is an exhibition exploring  the city of Rome in cross-section, observing its stratigraphic structure while attempting to map out a potential way forward. It does not look at a city in a pose but at a city in movement. The planning act it investigates looks not just at the final tangible outcome of an architectural project, which can only be verified after the event in Rome’s entangled fabric, but at the entire process as it unfolds by stages which can never quite be taken separately one from the other. This exploration, at once specific and wide-ranging, is structured through written work, drawings, photographs, collages, mockups and notes in progress. In order to convey this complexity in a plausible fashion, the WAR – Warehouse of Architecture and Research team of curators has divided the topic into three sections for debate: HISTORY, OBSERVATORY, MOSAIC. In the first section, history, WAR adopts the photomontage technique, revisiting the aesthetic side of a series of architectural operations around Rome whose generic similarities might appear to point to an implictly coordinated image at the city level, in the furrow of planning initiatives introduced from, and hailing from, other cities. This results in an up-to-date Table of Horrors, not in aversion to a belated or not especially contemporary planning act (the illustrious precedent objective) but reflecting on a clear stylistic standardisation unquestionably divorced from the context of the planning act and totally devoid of any credible designer dimension. The second section, observatory, showcases the taxonomic and occasionally paranoic-compulsive activities of a number of contemporary research platforms working on Rome: Il Contrafforte, with its methodical and affectedly educational approach; H501, which pursues the successful tradition of architectural drawing in Rome, developing it in a hypergraphical, naive vein; and Panteon magazine, a hardcopy mag hosting critical analysis of Rome’s 20th century architectural heritage, a one-of-its-kind in the field of independent trade publishing. The third section, mosaic, puts together an optimistic fresco, a picture gallery, of eleven emerging “under 40” Rome-based architectural practices that have made a name for themselves thanks to their ability to conjugate and communicate research and planning on a local, national and international scale: Sofia Albrigo, AUT AUT, Azzariti-Cappella, Brunelli-Ann Minciacchi, EXPAND, GICO, Grazzini-Tonazzini-Colombo, LATITUDE, SET, SUPERVOID, WAR. In addition to a summary anthology of work designed and produced by these practices, a site-specific theoretical-cum-formal exercise, a bridge over the Tiber, is displayed in accordance with a disciplinary tradition: “a fact of pure form, an object in full light” (Riccardo Morandi).
 

What emerges from Roma Novissima’s title, its layout, its content and, on a broader level, its intent is a desire to link the current debate on architecture to certain peaks of achievement in the ‘seventies and ‘eighties that made their mark on the city of Rome and elswhere, and that demand a necessary moment of reflection following the recent demise of such masters as Pietro Barucci, Paolo Portoghesi and Piero Sartogo.
 

 “The Nuovissimi aren’t a movement, an –ism, they’re always something unique” (Nanni Balestrini)