Studio 08

MAXXI STUDIO: the Home, the Monument, the Museum

Scott Woods and Kim Vo | CIVIC + LIVING
Special Advisor: Pippo Ciorra (Senior Curator, MAXXI Architecture)

PLEASE NOTE: this studio is available to students enrolled in ABPL90143 Studio D and ABPL90115 Studio E only.

Studio Description

In association with MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo (MAXXI, Rome), and anticipating the major retrospective Aldo Rossi. The Architect And The Cities, at the Zaha Hadid designed, National Museum of 21st Century Art (MAXXI) opening in December 2020

The architecture exhibition lies at the confounded intersection of the representation and generation of architecture and its discourses. The institutional setting of the museum functions as the place for the display of architecture, but paradoxically, suspends any evidence of architecture actually ‘being’ there. This architecture in absentia resists the museum’s institutional codes, practices and perceptual histories – something that art cannot do, but something that architecture seems to do naturally. Architectures unease in the museum buttresses Aldo Rossi’s claim of the disciplinary autonomy of architecture.

Studio Outcome

Students will engage with digitised drawings and other documents of Multi-Residential Housing Projects held by the MAXXI Architecture Archive. These projects have been influenced by Aldo Rossi’s popular ideas of the 60s, 70s, and 80s that supported the rejection of Modernism and the reconsideration of historical time within the architecture of the city. Projects from the Archive become canvases for students to investigate:

1. The idea of the Monument within architecture culture
2. The idea of Display within the museum

Through an initial research and development phase students will move in to a ‘major project’ with the aim to corroborate suspicions that the museum is a place for the displacement of architecture. Consequently, students should make a case for how Architectures displacement within their projects are equivalent to the coming into being of new architectural modalities, co-dependent, or independent of the museum.

Students will work with the interior of the Zaha Hadid designed MAXXI museum, via supplied drawings, as the ‘context’ for their multi-residential project.

Studio Leaders

Scott Woods Scott is an Academic Fellow in Architecture at MSD, and coordinator of the foundation studio in the Bachelor of Design. Scott investigates the museum, its curatorial conditions and representations by leading design studios at MSD and at ECA in Venice. His work in the design studio provides a context for the incubation and negotiation of interdisciplinary concerns governing museum futures.

Kim Võ Kim is an architecture graduate from the University of Melbourne, where he was a recipient of the Dean’s Honour Award in 2018 and 2019. Kim has worked in architectural practice both in Vietnam and Australia. He is the current Senior Studio Tutor in Foundation of Design: Representation at the University of Melbourne.

Readings & References

MONUMENT

• Raphael Moneo, Aldo Rossi: The Idea of Architecture and the Modena Cemetery. in Oppositions 5, Summer 1976.
• Alois Reigl, The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and its Origin. in Oppositions 25, Fall 1982
• Kurt W. Forster, Monument, Memory, and the Morality of Architecture. in Oppositions 25, Fall 1982
• Peter Eisenman, Post-Functionalism. in Oppositions 6, Fall 1976.

DISPLAY / EXHIBITION

• Aaron Levy and William Menking, Four Conversations on the Architecture of Discourse – Venice, New York, London, Chicago
• Roberto Gigliotti, Displayed Spaces: New Means of Architecture Presentation Through Exhibitions
• Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, Exhibit A: Exhibitions That Transformed Architecture 1948 to 2000
• Thordis Arrhenius, Place and Displacement: Exhibiting Architecture

Schedule 12:00-15:00 Mondays, 15:15-18:15 Thursdays

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