Curated by Margherita Guccione, Director of MAXXI Architettura and Pippo Ciorra, Senior curator of MAXXI Architettura, the exhibition offers different interpretations that intersect each other: from the singular to the collective, the path winds through the "duets", the pavilions located specific, the story in images through author photography. "Between the past and the present - says Margherita Guccione - the reflection on living is an opportunity to highlight the centrality of this theme both in the projects of the masters of the past and in the new productions of Italian and international architects, who will enrich the Museum's collection with the extraordinary projects of, among others, Demogo, Adjaye, Noero and PezoVon Ellrichshausen.
Yesterday as today, the project's ability to look ahead and to prefigure the new models of contemporary housing emerges ”. Singular-Collective explores the scalar and social dimension of living: from the individual to the collective, from the single-family home to the intensive neighborhood. It is precisely in single-family homes that the greatest degree of experimentation is reached, as in the Casa Baldi in Rome, the first work by Paolo Portoghesi, a project from 1959 that the exhibition connects with The Capital Hill, the "spatial" house designed by Zaha Hadid Architects for Russian billionaire Vladislav Doronin and completed in 2018, which stands in the middle of the forest near Moscow. The path then winds through a survey of the intermediate dimension of collective living , with a dive into the materials of the archives of Giulio Gra and Monaco Luccichenti, authors between the 30s and the 50s of the most famous Roman buildings. Among these, also the Villino in via Colli della Farnesina by Francesco Berarducci, in whose singular spaces a disturbing Gian Maria Volontè wandered in the film by Elio Petri Investigation of a citizen above all suspicion , which in the exhibition dialogues with the designed building in Joannesburg by Jo Noero. The works on display (drawings, models, photographs, videos, documents) reflect both on the forms and on the materials of architecture, in close relationship with the natural environment or with the requests for identity expressed by the clients, up to some of the most interesting of widespread quality expressed right in the Roman buildings. A larger urban sector, consisting of the neighborhood, is investigated through the successful experience of INA Casa in the reconstruction of the country and in the urbanization process of the 1950s and 1960s, such as the neighborhoods designed by Enrico Del Debbio (Ponticelli district in Naples) , Michele Valori (Tiburtino district in Rome), Mario Paniconi and Giulio Pediconi (Valco San Paolo district in Rome). The path ends in the experience of the urban and social mega-laboratory represented by Mario Fiorentino's Corviale, rethought in the light of the new projects for its regeneration. The exhibition therefore offers the opportunity for a reasoning on the boundary between the individual experience of living and its insertion into the community dimension. Works created by masters of architecture as well as by architects of the new generation are exhibited: projects distant in time and space but assonant and similar by method applied, by context in which they are placed or by the formal research that associates them, are put live visual relationship to offer a further suggestion, in a daring "game of couples".