Expo Re-cycle in Rome
Until the 29th of April, the MAXXI Museum in Rome exhibits the interesting exhibition ´RE-CYCLE. Strategie per l´architettura, la città e il planeta´, which translates as ´Strategies for architecture, the city and the planet´, and it deals with the issue of recycling in architecture, to minimize the impact on nature by making the most of environmental factors in a harmonic way.
The exhibition is made up around drawings, photographs, witnesses and videos that give account of the sustainable projects in architecture, urbanism and landscapes. In the same exhibition there are works by artists, photographers and media producers.
To give a global image, the museum exhibits new projects and historical ones, such as the ones by Peter Eisemann and videos on recycling of abandoned works by Frank O. Gahry & Venturi and Scott Brown and Associates.
Peter Eisemann is an American architect of Jewish origin that worked with Walter Gropius, director of the Bauhaus. Known for his avant-garde and provocative vision, he´s the author of enormous constructions such as the Wexner Center for the arts of Ohio State University.
Another of the exhibitors is Lacaton & Vassal with the transformation project of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. The architects Anne Lacaton and Jean Philippe Vassal created an office in Bordeaux to produce single-family houses using, rationally, new materials that allowed them to design in an ingenious way rooming solution. Their architectonic concept is avant-gardist by using polycarbonate from industrial greenhouses that allows them to build bigger spaces and make better use of light, as well as their modern shapes incorporating nature. Their designs allow the co-existance of nature and mankind, respecting the trees by integrating them in the construction.
To show that recycling is related with architectonic work, they have set up works that show interesting proposals of creative recycling, such as the EcoArk structure in Taipei, made with 1.5 million used bottles by the Far Eastern Group. it´s 130 metres wide and 26 metres tall, and it was donated to the city´s council.
To make any sense from the architecture of recycling, there are two installations by the artists Fernando and Humberto Campana outside the museum. The work titled ´Maloca´, referring to the home of the indians in the Amazon, is made with wood and synthetic raffia to re-interpret indian houses that the public are received in.
One of the most creative works in the exhibition is the section with the faces of Jimi Hendrix and other rock stars, engraved on X-rays of a fractured skull or a broken leg due to the cold of Russia in wartime.
Today there are many techniques to design new shapes with waste materials and the architects have taken this possibility very seriously, especially when minimalist architecture allows them to work with simple elements that also give them good conditions to isolate and preserve cold in winter and heat in summer, handling light to live with less energy use, etc.
For more information: http://www.fondazionemaxxi.it/2011/12/01/recycle/
Nancy Guzman
Take a few days rest by renting apartments in Rome and get to know all the wonders of recycling in the exhibition at the MAXXI Museum.
