PUBLISHING SERIES

Radical Exhibited Thought. Exhibitions of Architecture, 1

Edited by Anna Rosellini, Stefano Setti

Starting in the 1960s, with the emergence of social phenomena ranging from counter-culture, to hippies, student protests, occupations, workers’ strikes and the emergence of ecological urgencies, against the backdrop of the escalation or onset of war conflicts and the advent of the “strategy of tension”, the Italian architects put in place alternative attitudes to manifest ideal, social aspirations, with forms of design that reject custom, both in the substance of the works and in their presentation. The concept of exhibition undergoes a jolt that tends to pour new works into those city streets that have become privileged places of protest. Even exhibitions with experimental content, but organised indoors in official institutional venues, are overwhelmed by the movement of protest, to the point that what is exhibited is no longer the works but the mass of young people, their collectives, their actions and their installations. Occupations of universities and openings of social centres become other epicentres, however transient, of phenomena not unlike those promoted by artists engaged in the creation of happenings.
The experiences of radical architecture and design and of exalted rationalism, which are those outlined at the end of the 1960s and labelled with those definitions, nevertheless managed to persist over the course of the following years, in forms that were not always recognisable, giving rise to exhibition installations that nevertheless continued to maintain a degree of experimentalism, although the cultural horizon and the references of the project had changed, and sometimes in decisive terms. What happened in the 1980s, in famous national institutional venues, with the themed installations entrusted to well-known Italian and foreign architects, marked a decisive chapter in the form of the enunciation of architectural design issues in continuity with the creative and theoretical tools that had been experimented during the 1960s.

Call opening: July 2024

Call closing: 30 September 2024

Submissions by: 31 January 2025

Publication: May 2025

Radical Exhibited Thought. Exhibitions of Architecture, 2

Edited by Sandra Costa, Alessandro Paolo Lena

The volume is intended as a moment of historical, formal and methodological reflection dedicated to the different cultural phases that marked architecture exhibitions in a historical period characterised by drastic technical and stylistic, as well as social and urbanistic, changes. If in the early years of Italian Unification, architecture exhibitions were integrated within exhibitions also dedicated to the fine arts and industry, at the beginning of the 20th century architecture acquired its own narrative independence as an autonomous exhibition type, in dialogue with new disciplinary dimensions, such as ethnography. Starting from the second decade of the 20th century, the action of the avant-garde also had a response in the Italian exhibition scene. Starting in 1933 with the Milan Triennale, architecture profoundly influenced the exhibitions of the time, through layouts in dialogue with contemporary European expressions, often linked to a functionalist style. Alongside innovative and avant-garde projects, attention is also paid to the techniques of rural architecture, where vernacular forms are presented as evidence and a possible source of inspiration for updating the grammar of architectural composition. The inter-war period is marked by the emergence of rationalist research and its presentation to the public. The heated confrontation between the rationalist current and a more markedly celebratory monumentalism of power characterised the entire fourth decade of the century, until the prevalence of the second tendency, which was to find its most internationally accepted form in the Universal Exhibition of 1942, which never took place. Starting from these premises, architectural exhibitions, investigated through integrated methodologies contemplating different design, organisational and communication strategies, contributed to the evolution of discourses on the objectives and function of architectural practice. In the composite dialogue between built or imagined architecture and museographic display, the historical memory of the early 20th century and today's renewed gaze on those exhibitions highlight ruptures and continuities destined to characterise temporary or permanent exhibition forms.

Call opening: October 2024

Call closing: 31 January 2025

Submissions by: 31 May 2025

Publication: September 2025

Radical Exhibited Thought. Exhibitions of Architecture, 3

Edited by Roberto Pinto, Stefano Setti

The volume intends to present a panorama of art exhibitions that have devoted attention to or made reflections on architecture. The chronology identified goes from the 1970s to the present day: starting from a moment of important reconsideration of different artistic media, accompanied by the use of new art forms such as performance, the aim of the volume is twofold. On the one hand, the intention is to understand how some protagonists, through specific exhibitions realised in Italy during the period examined, have carried out reasoning on the discipline of architecture and the problems connected to it, sometimes neglected in the more usual design or sector practice. On the other hand, again starting from the theme of the exhibition, accompanied by that of the display and the setting up, the points of contact between the various disciplines will be assessed with the aim of evaluating forms of exhibition hybridisation that increasingly characterise the contemporary world.

Call opening: December 2024

Call closing: 30 April 2025

Submissions by: August 2025

Publication: December 2025

Radical Thought Exhibited. Exhibitions of Architecture, 4

edited by Anna Rosellini

Call opening: March 2025

Call closing: 30 June 2025

Submissions by: October 2025

Publication: February 2026