Showing how Italy builds

Architectural Review, The, July, 2004

The exhibition mounted by Mario Cucinella's practice, MCA, in Cremona, Italy in May was memorable and suggested new approaches to demonstrating architecture. It was held in the converted church of S Maria della Pieta, a big volume that allowed the show to live up to its title, Scala 1/1, by permitting details and prototypes of recent projects to be displayed full-size. For instance, the surprising construction of the Bologna exhibition pavilion (ARs October and December 2003), with its ingenious modulations of light and climate, was made clear with a section through wall, floor and roof made using the same components as the real building.

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The very tall ecclesiastical exhibition space was modified and made intimate by dividing it vertically with translucent curtains made of building plastic on which had been screen-printed full-sized images of parts of MCA's buildings. Curiously, lighting allowed different images to appear on opposite sides of the same curtain, so each of the rooms along the line of the old nave became an intensely evocative space devoted to a particular project or idea. Cucinella worked with Piano for several years, and shares with him (unlike most contemporary Italian architects) a fascination for the tectonic, for material and constructional invention. By coincidence, a retrospective exhibition of Piano's work opened in Genoa within a week of Cucinella's show. It is (until 31 October) in the fortress building of the old harbour of the city, which has over the years all been transformed by Piano into a proper extension of the fine old town centre, though you have to go under a horrid '60s urban motorway to make the link. The port is now full of exhibition and leisure uses, a place where old and new are neatly knitted.

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Piano, in our terms Genoa's most famous son, was properly honoured in his own city. Proceedings started on a floating pier, the Isola delle Chiatte, part of his extension to the Porto Antico, with speeches from civic dignitaries and an excellent brass quartet, following which a special boat took us to the other side of the water and the exhibition proper at the Porta Siberia. Immense queues developed, but everyone was happily served with apparently inexhaustible supplies of food and wine.

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Once inside the exhibition, it was clear why the queues were necessary. The show is extraordinarily complicated and delicate, and deserves quiet study; you often have to sit down to look more intensely at small items on tables. A crowded private view would have been ridiculous, and probably destructive, so people had to enter in a trickle. Work is shown through a stimulating profusion of models, drawings, photographs and interactive video displays. The models in particular are marvellously evocative: beautifully made, they not only illustrate the principles of the buildings and constructions they represent, but are exquisite objects in themselves. Yet they are working instruments, and clearly show the operation of a great constructive and spatial imagination. P.D.

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