Museum as a Space For Theory and Critical Agency

The lecture will focus firstly on Pippo Ciorra’s “curatorial project” at the MAXXI and, secondly, on providing highlights on some of the present and future projects, mainly Stop Drawing, an investigation on the changing role of design and communication tools in architecture. The backdrop of the conversation is the present role of architecture museums, suspended between social and disciplinary stances.

Introduction and Moderation

Francesca Romana Forlini

Visiting Assistant Professor

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Speaker

Pippo Ciorra

Architect, critic and professor at SAAD (University of Camerino) and director of the PhD program “Villard d’Honnecourt” at IUAV

Pippo Ciorra is an architect, critic and professor at SAAD (University of Camerino) and director of the PhD program “Villard d’Honnecourt” at IUAV.

Author of books and essays, he was part of the curatorial team for the 1991 Architecture Venice Biennale and juror for the 2016 edition. He has curated exhibitions in Italy and abroad. Since 2009, he is Senior Curator of MAXXI Architettura in Rome and co-director of “Premio Italiano d’Architettura”. His main research fields are late 20th-century Italian architecture, museums and exhibitions, urban and architectural theory and its social and political implications. He’s currently a senior fellow at the Italian Academy, Columbia University

Design Series: WORLDS UN/DESIGNED: Unscripted, Atypical, Unnatural, and Uncontrolled

Conventions have insistently shaped the practices of design and architecture. Design norms – planning conventions, material classifications, graphic standards, or accepted ideas of spatial experiences – attest to the ways designers approach world-building. Design norms often reveal a reliance on typified and naturalized views of spaces, systems, bodies, materials, and built environments that invariably foreclose more inclusive and progressive paradigms for our collective futures.

The SoAD AY 24-25 lecture and event series, Worlds Un/Designed seeks to deconstruct conventions in design, architecture, and urbanism by challenging typical stereotypes in design practices, urban systems, technological dependencies, gender and abilities, conceptions of natural and unnatural, and the blurring of physical and digital environments.

Worlds Un/Designed aims to address the exclusions and limitations inscribed in our existing constructed environments by engaging with questions of ecology, urbanity, sustainability, accessibility, mobility, and inclusion. The lecture and event series will include lecture presentations, book discussions and exhibitions as subtopics of the Un/Designed theme including among others: Unscripted addressing experiential perspectives of spatial design, unconventional usage and affordances; Atypical, addressing inclusive design for the atypical user; Unnatural interrogating the making of natural and unnatural biobased materials materials; and Uncontrolled, discussing on autonomous systems, unsupervised intelligence, and emergent forms. By critically reflecting on the effects of conventions this lecture series calls for
stimulating our collective imagination towards healthier alternative future worlds, yet to be designed.