A major exhibition on women in architecture at MAXXI in Rome.

From the twentieth-century stereotype of the charismatic grandmaster to the growing presence of women, collectives, and studios identified with couples, the anthropological change of the architecture profession. It is an exhibition on great female architects that MAXXI in Rome is organizing from December 16, 2021 to September 11, 2022 in its venue, which, moreover, was also designed by a great architect, Zaha Hadid: it is Buone Nuove. Women in Architecture, a journey into the feminine evolution of the architecture profession from the pioneers of the early 20th century to the archistars of today, from multidisciplinary collectives to large international firms led by female designers, curated by Pippo Ciorra, Elena Motisi and Elena Tinacci, with a feminine installation designed by Matilde Cassani.

There are many female architects on whom the exhibition casts its gaze: from Signe Hornborg, the first woman in the world to laurer in architecture, in Helsinki in 1890, to Zaha Hadid, the first architect to receive the prestigious Pritzker Prize in 2004. From Norma Merrick Sklarek, dubbed the “Rosa Parks of architecture” as the first African American to enter the profession in 1954, to modernist design icons such as Charlotte Perriand and Eileen Gray. From Ada Louise Huxtable, inventor in the 1960s of architecture criticism with her column in the New York Times and winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1970, to Italian pioneers such as landscape architect Maria Teresa Parpagliolo, to some of the most interesting and representative exponents of the contemporary architecture firmament. Among them, the well-known Elizabeth Diller and Kazuyo Sejima or the young up-and-comers Francesca Torzo and Lucy Styles, already present in the MAXXI Architettura collection. These are some of the protaginists of the exhibition Buone Nuove. Women in Architecture. Through a historical narrative and a broad overview of the current international situation, the exhibition recounts the evolution of the profession of architect in the last century, with the overcoming of the stereotype of the great master, the undisputed head of the firm, in favor of a new geography of the profession in which the female presence is becoming increasingly strong and authoritative. This anthropological mutation reflects a series of epochal changes in society and, consequently, in the role of architecture, which today confronts social and environmental issues, technology, and lattivism for gender equality and against all discrimination.

Good New is divided into four thematic areas: Stories, Practices, Narratives and Visions, plus you can see the site-specific installation Unseen by Frida Escobedo. The protagonists of the Stories section are 85 female architects, designers, and architectural scholars who, throughout the 20th century, marked the growth and evolution of the profession for women. They include, in addition to the aforementioned Signe Hornborg, Norma Merrick Sklarek and Ada Louise Huxtable; Charlotte Perriand and Eileen Gray, pioneers and icons of contemporary design; Phyllis Lambert and Lina Bo Bardi, among the most significant and revolutionary figures of the 20th century; and many others, often lesser known but equally decisive. Their stories are told through documents, photographs, correspondence, and models arranged on eight tables/islands that punctuate the exhibition space and divide it into eleven rooms, each dedicated to one of the protagonists of the PRACTICAL section. The titles of the eight thematic tables are: First Women, Mise en scéne, The City of Women, Lady Manager, Nomadisms, Duets, Voices and Tracks. The Stories feature some of the most valuable authors and materials in the MAXXI Architettura collection directed by Margherita Guccione, as in the case of Cini Boeri, Maria Giuseppina Grasso Cannizzo, Studio Labirinto, Elisabetta Terragni and many others.

Pratiche, on the other hand, is a look at the international landscape of contemporary architecture through the work of eleven female architects, considered exemplary both for the quality of their research and because they express different ways of interpreting architecture and practicing it: designers who lead large studios, who work alone, who collaborate with other women or with a partner, who are part of collectives. Each is presented through videos, prototypes, models, photographs, site-specific installations. Environmental sustainability, social dimensions, the relationship between tradition and innovation and between different disciplines are elements that characterize the different practices. The artistic nature emerges in the works of Elizabeth Diller, who presents at MAXXI the famous installation Bad Press and the large-scale cultural space on a metropolitan scale The Shed in New York, and in those of Mariam Kamara, a Nigerian architect named by the New York Times among the fifteen Creative Women of Our Time who has created for the exhibition the intimate and personal installation Room for introspection, a black room in which elements of her culture surface. Manual craftsmanship and technological awareness dialogue in the work of Lina Ghotmeh, a Lebanese architect with a studio in Paris who brings to MAXXI Stone Garden, a building between the historic city and the port area of Beirut whose facade is handcrafted. Anupama Kundoo, of Indian origin with a studio also in Berlin, presents a synthesis of her research focused on environmental and economic sustainability and the reinterpretation of tradition, with a focus on the use of ferrocement for prefabricated buildings, such as theEasy WC exhibited at MAXXI. Benedetta Tagliabue, head of the EMBT studio in Barcelona, is exhibiting the Spanish Pavilion for the 2010Expo in Shanghai, in which wicker weaving made by local artisans becomes a sustainable construction technique. The project reflects an interest in materials, craft practices, and the interface between digital and manual. Lu Wenyu, founder with her husband Wang Shu of Amateur Architecture Studio, in Hangzhou, China, brings to MAXXI an installation of great poetry: the prototype of the bird’s-wing pitch of the wooden roof of theLinan History Museum, which reflects the firm’s strong connection to the local area, materials and building techniques. Environmental sustainability characterizes all projects by Dorte Mandrup, founder of the Copenhagen-based firm Dorte Mandrup A/S, which is active worldwide with a team of 75 people. For MAXXI, he chose the steel model of theIcefjord Centre in Greenland, a device designed to allow the public to see for themselves the effects of climate change. Challenging the male professional model are Jeanne Gang, head of Chicago-based Studio Gang with offices around the world, and Grafton Architects, a firm founded in Dublin in 1978 by Yvonne Farrel and Shelley McNamara that has climbed to the top of world architecture. Gang is presenting at MAXXI the Gilder Center, an extension to New York’s Museum of Natural History, a cavernous body housing galleries, educational spaces and a library. Grafton, famous for projects for educational spaces, such as that of Bocconi University in Milan, present the Faculty of Economics in Toulouse, a building made of concrete and local bricks that unites the ancient center and the modern city. Finally, Kazuyo Sejima and Assemble experiment with new and flexible forms of association. Sejima opened his studio in Tokyo in 1987and in 1995 with Ryue Nisghizawa founded SANAA: the two architects react professionally differently according to the nature and scale of the assignments. At MAXXI, Sejima previews the Cenetr Design Event in Puyan, China, an ongoing project. Assemble, a London-based multidisciplinary collective that combines architecture, art and design, in which the social component is very strong, narrates through a collage of videos The Voice of Children, which explores children’s play spaces.

Many of the installations in the Practices are opportunities for new acquisitions by the museum: this will be the case for SANAA’s works by Frida Escobedo, which have already been acquired, and others for which the process is ongoing. Unseen by Mexican Frida Escobedo is a tribute to Anni Albers, heroine of the Bauhaus, and is intended as an opportunity to reflect on theinvisibility of the female figure and the theme of time in architecture. It is an installation created for the exhibition, which brings into dialogue a drawing by the German designer with a critical reinterpretation of one of Albers’ most symbolic tapestries. A video narration tells the context of the work. Larazzo, now removed, was made for the Camino Real hotel in Mexico City, built for the 1968 Olympic Games. Escobedo’s project is the result of the symbolic and material unraveling of Anni Albers’ original design: it is literally by unraveling what remains of the past that we can rethink the relationship between progress and development, craftsmanship and industrial production, identity and difference.

The Narratives section introduces another narrative level of the exhibition, populated by the faces and voices of important figures from the worlds of architecture, academia and research. These are twelve interviews, conducted by the Mies.TV collective, with witnesses such as Phyllis Lambert, scholars such as Sylvia Lavin, Beatriz Colomina, Maristella Casciato, and Mary McLeod, curators such as Paola Antonelli and Mariana Pestana, and young designers such as Liz Ogbu or Marwa Al-Sabouni, and heads of institutions and journals such as Giovanna Borasi, Martha Thorne, and Manon Mollard. Finally, with Visions, the exhibition also introduces a reflection on the relationship between gender identity and space, told through 5 videos produced as part of the Future Architecture Platform program, a network of 27 European institutions that engages young creatives each year in activities and events scattered throughout Europe. Selected through an open call, the authors of the five videos are: Edit Collective, Emma Hirsk, fem_arc collective, Matty Roodt, Meghan Ho-Tong, Lucienne Bestall and Regner Ramos.

On the occasion of the exhibition, from January 2022, the videogallery will host a selection of documentaries, films and short films to discover the female architects and designers who, from the 20th century to the present, have revolutionized the way the architecture profession is conceived. MAXXI is also proposing, from February 2022, a new cycle of Histories of Architecture: through a narrative by characters and salient episodes, scholars, professors and popularizers will give lectures on how the female presence has evolved in architecture. Speakers include Mario Lupano, Paola Nicolin, Pippo Ciorra, and Margherita Guccione. For all information you can visit the MAXXI website.

In the photo: Maria Giuseppina Grasso Cannizzo, PMR2.2008 Control Tower of the Tourist Port, Marina di Ragusa (Ragusa)

A major exhibition on women in architecture at MAXXI in Rome.

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