NOTHING PRECISE. THAT IS: ARCHITECTURES, STRATEGIES, HERESIES, IMMEDIATE HAPPINESS , AVOIDING THE WAIT STORIES, DISCOVERIES, AND GENEALOGIES FOR BETTER TIMES.

“Nothing specific, that is: architecture, strategies, heresies, stories, discoveries, and genealogies for immediate happiness, avoiding the wait for better times.” This is the exhibition, curated by Luigi Prestinenza Puglisi, created as a broad reflection and relaunch for contemporary Italian architecture.

Hosted until April 12 in the Scarpa Area of the Querini Stampalia Foundation in Venice, it presents—through material models in ceramic and concrete, images, figures, and technical drawings composed and recomposed in a narrative path—the competition project for the expansion of the MAXXI in Rome (2022) drawn up by three of the most important contemporary Italian architects,

Peluffo&Partners, Stefano Pujatti ELASTICOFarm, and Beniamino Servino. A work that courageously tackles some culturally unavoidable issues for architecture today. Among these is the importance of popular architecture that is shared and shareable. The need to work on the ephemeral, with agile and modifiable works. The need to draw on memory through forms that populate our imagination. The centrality of research on architectural space understood as a connection between individual andì collective feeling. 

“Italians,” said Edoardo Persico, “must face … the ability to believe in precise ideologies.” It was 1934, but little has changed since then. We Italians continue to have a suspicious attitude towards technology and progress. We suspect that the future will not keep its promises; it distresses us, it is threatening. From a history perceived as a succession of collapses, a reactionary attitude arises that cancels out the present and projects us into the past. But this can also become the ability to recreate and recompose fragments, as in Scarpa, Moretti, or Michelucci. Fragments, after all, serve to understand who we are, not where we are going: they do not produce certainties, but emotional and narrative genealogies. Architectures that privilege narrative over theorem, play over efficiency, irony over technocracy. That distrust abstraction and intellectualism and seek clear forms and shared symbols.

Like neorealism in the arts, it does not reproduce reality but interprets it. Its strength lies in the ephemeral, in genealogy, in authorship, and in the popular dimension. Perhaps insufficient for global challenges, but capable of creating, through storytelling, spaces of freedom. The project we present materializes a possibility for the architecture of the near future. Living in the happiness of the present and shunning the totalizing utopias of better times.”

(Luigi Prestinenza Puglisi)

The need to present it again in an exhibition arose precisely with the aim of highlighting this possibility for the future, presenting the project in an installation that reconstructs its creation through a narrative journey of references and reflections. Such as the reference to popular imagery, to Piero della Francesca, to Fellini, and in this case to the pages of the Libro del Sarto, a fashion catalog from a 16th century Milanese atelier preserved at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia. The models for the field tents and pavilions, set up in 1548 in Piazza del Castello for the arrival in Milan of Philip of Spain, represent the triumph of the ephemeral, providing the backdrop for the joust and the staging of the social pact between sovereign and people. The exhibition also draws attention to its no less surprising similarities to the recent staging of Giovanni Bellini’s Presentation of Jesus at the Temple and Carlo Scarpa’s Area.

The exhibition is completed by Ernesta Caviola’s short film “Verso la luce” (Towards the Light), about Piero della Francesca’s Legend of the True Cross.