At MAXXI – the National Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome – architecture is turned into conversation, and conversation into spatial experience. Opening the exhibition Vitalità dell’architettura italiana 1946–2025, inaugurated on 28 May in the presence of President Sergio Mattarella, a video installation by Dotdotdot sets the tone right from the outset: the entrance to the Galleria KME becomes a suspended agora of voices, ideas and positions.
Curated by Pippo Ciorra and Elena Tinacci, the exhibition traces eighty years of Italian architecture. But rather than laying things out as a neat, linear story or a polished canon, it immediately embraces complexity. What unfolds is less a narrative than a field of tensions, overlapping viewpoints that sit side by side without ever quite settling into agreement.
Eight leading figures of Italian architecture – Stefano Boeri, Massimiliano Fuksas, Maria Giuseppina Grasso Cannizzo, Renzo Piano, Franco Purini, Elisabetta Terragni, Paola Viganò and Cino Zucchi – are each given their own screen, arranged across stepped seating on two levels. The effect is deliberately staged, almost like a civic assembly or parliamentary chamber, where each voice is given its turn, but none gets the final word.
As Laura Dellamotta, co-founder and General Manager of Dotdotdot, puts it, the idea was never to build a pantheon of “great names”, but something closer to a conversation held in suspension, distinct intellectual positions placed in the same space without being forced into harmony. Agreement isn’t the point; friction is part of the language.
The interviews were filmed in the architects’ own studios, each set slightly different yet held together by a shared framework. Each protagonist sits on a chair of their own choosing – a small but telling detail that quietly brings a personal note into a structured format. Dotdotdot oversaw the whole process, from concept and narrative design to direction, storyboard and installation, with cinematography by Lucio La Pietra.
What comes through is not a single story of Italian architecture, but a constellation of positions. Across the eight voices, architecture shifts between discipline and openness, theoretical rigour and lived experience, confidence in the future and a clear-eyed reading of the present. Rather than ironing out these differences, the installation lets them stand – unpolished, sometimes in tension, but always alive.
In the end, the installation works as both threshold and statement. It opens the exhibition not with answers, but with questions; not with closure, but with plurality. At MAXXI, architecture is not simply shown – it is spoken, tested, and kept deliberately open-ended.
