Restless Architecture. Diller Scofidio + Renfro

Curated and designed by one of the world’s most famous and influential design studios, the New York-based firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R), the exhibition in the MAXXI museum’s KME gallery is the result of a research on movement as an internal property of architecture. It is an unexpected journey to discover “fluid” buildings that can move and act, change their configuration, and relate to the environment and those who inhabit them.

Movement, understood in all its forms and applied to architecture, has always been an essential feature of the work of the New York-based studio, which is also the protagonist of the exhibition. Kinetic performances, choreographies, mobile and mechanical architectures, robotic installations, moving images on dynamic structures represent a crucial tool for overcoming the limits of the architectural discipline and keeping it abreast of a society in which technology, science, social and ecological urgencies march at ever-increasing speed.

The exhibition design by DS+R studio was conceived as a “kinetic” choreographic work, with a system of curtains that moves through the gallery continually redefining its space and offering unexpected readings. The 26 projects on display illustrate the astonishing possibilities of an architecture defined by movement, capable of adapting to technological, economic or social changes, of satisfying the different needs of its occupants and of accommodating the forces of nature. This is the case, for instance, of the project for the Italian Pavilion at the International Exhibition - EXPO 70 by Maurizio Sacripanti, the iconic The Shed (2019) in New York signed by the Diller Scofidio + Renfro studio, the Nakagin Capsule Tower (1970) by Kisho Kurokawa, which will have one of the original modules (capsules) displayed in the Alighiero Boetti square, the Maison á Bordeaux (1998) by Rem Koolhaas' Dutch studio OMA or Villa Girasole (1935) by Angelo Invernizzi.

Header: The Shed, photo © Iwan Baan, Courtesy DS+R