An exhibition to tell the story of the architecture of rationalist Pesaro

From June 24 to Oct. 23, 2022, the Civic Museums of Pesaro, in the Palazzo Mosca venue, will host the exhibitionPU.Ra (“Pesaro-Urbino Rationalist”), promoted by the Municipality of Pesaro, Fondazione Pescheria, Sistema Museo and the Liceo Artistico F. Mengaroni, curated by Marcello Smarrelli. The exhibition focuses on some excellences from the architectural heritage of Pesaro, Fano and Urbino, built between the 1920s and the 1940s, the subject of a careful study conducted by War (Warehouse of Architecture and Research), through the photographic lens of Anton Giulio Onofri.

Starting from the restyling curated by War studio of the City Hall building, a rationalist building designed by engineer Cesare Pascoletti in the 1940s and finished in the 1950s, PU.Ra aims to radically change the perception of these buildings, allowing their qualities and aesthetic merits to re-emerge from the rubble of history, as purified of the ideological meanings and propagandistic intentions characteristic of the historical period in which they saw the light of day.

The reflections generated by the restoration of the town hall have made it possible to recognize in retrospect the beauty of these architectures. Their design elegance, fine materials and refined compositional proportions lead one to place them rightfully in a happy moment of art, thanks to their attention to detail and constructive development. The 36 photographs by Anton Giulio Onofri on display in the exhibition invite us to reconsider in a new light a selected corpus of well-known and frequented public buildings, focusing attention on the textures and surfaces of architectures that have always been in the public eye, but neglected or hastily dismissed as evidence of the fascist regime.

An integral part of the exhibition’s path to realization was the involvement of the students of the Liceo Artistico Mengaroni, which, thanks to the Ministry of Education’s PON (National Operational Program), allowed the experts of the PU.Ra project to intervene. As part of a workshop that took up a good part of the ’21/’22 school year, together with War and Anton Giulio Onofri, the students, coordinated by professor Chiara Francesconi and supported by ceramist Carlo Bertani, created a series of ceramic artifacts, inspired by the details of the rationalist architecture illustrated in the photos, initiating a conceptual path of ideological purification and aesthetic redemption.

A key element of the exhibition project is the table covered with a layer of small colored ceramic debris from which the objects made by the students of the Liceo Mengaroni emerge: this device is inspired by a study by Aldo Rossi, who hypothesized a table - a reinterpretation of one of his famous Milanese architectures - on which were arranged ceramic miniatures of some iconic monuments scattered around the world that, transformed into objects, were put in communication with each other in a fertile dialogue of references and reinterpretations.Thus the young students, authors of the ceramics, became the authentic protagonists of this curatorial affair, probably the only ones able to truly absolve the works investigated thanks to the purity of their gaze and their analytical but lighthearted reinterpretations.

The exhibition itinerary includes other dialogues and comparisons: first, the collection of the original projects submitted in the 1930s to the competition for the Palazzo del Comune di Pesaro, and preserved by the Stroppa Nobili Archive; and finally, in the last two rooms of the exhibition, a large selection from the Vinciguerra Collection catalog: in this case, full-height photographs of interiors of buildings reconnect with works of art and applied art belonging to the same period as the architectures under consideration, created by Gio Ponti, Carlo Scarpa, Enrico Prampolini, Tomaso Buzzi, Napoleone Martinuzzi, Mario Sironi, Emanuele Cavalli and others.

The exhibition is realized with the participation of Archivio Stroppa Nobili and is supported by the sponsors Modus Pesaro, Officina d’Arte Wallas, Zolfanelli Impianti Pesaro, and PON funds for schools with the Ministry of Education and the European Union-European Social Fund.

An exhibition to tell the story of the architecture of rationalist Pesaro

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