BIENNALE ARCHITETTURA 2016 - NATIONAL PARTICIPATION OF ITALY

TAKING CARE is an action that arises in the Italian Pavilion at the Biennale Architettura 2016 and then takes root and exists outside it. It has two purposes: to present a vision of architecture as service to the community; to demonstrate, with tangible proofs, how in taking care of people and places, principles and resources, architecture makes a difference. Here we are thinking of architecture in the service of common goods and capable of increasing the human social and environmental capital, while curbing marginalization and exclusion. We want architecture to be a driving force for new visions, a powerful medium for communicating, an instrument through which many outer city areas can claim rights, progress, opportunity and inclusion. TAMassociati

With TAKING CARE – Designing for the Common Good, the TAMassociati curatorial team is developing the theme of architecture as a social art and an instrument in the service of the community, ensuring its access to the common goods. Our reflection is embodied in an initial theoretical section (“Thinking”). Then a double section in the middle presents good architectural and social practices that give visible form to the idea of the Common Good (“Meeting”). Finally there is an explicit call to action in favor of communities in degraded and marginal areas (“Acting”). The catalogue and the media that recount the curatorial project use original and immediate displays and methods of communication.

'Meeting' is an exhibition of 20 architectural projects, all produced by as many design offices in Italy and abroad. Taken together, they recount how subjects, when they become co-authors, can create spaces and places useful to the community, so devoting equal importance both to the processes and the built work. This section identifies 10 areas of investigation – legality, health, living, environment, education, culture, play, science, nutrition and work – accompanied by a gallery of photographs that give visible form to the idea of the common good in Italy.

'Acting', the culmination of the exhibition, is embodied in a concrete call to action. 'Acting' presents 5 displays of the mobile devices designed for direct intervention in marginal areas of Italy. They are mobile units mounted on trailers, designed by 5 Italian firms in collaboration with 5 associations long engaged in seeking to curb social and environmental degradation:  AIB (Italian Library Association) + Alterstudio Partners, Emergency + Matilde Cassani, Legambiente + ARCò, Libera + Antonio Scarponi / Conceptual Devices, UISP (Italian Union for Sport for All) + NOWA.

The exhibition installation is low cost. Today low cost basically means increasing efficiency and eliminating the superfluous, while optimizing services and costs to the benefit of end users and society. Low cost design can be an extraordinary opportunity to focus on the question of the real nature of consumption and develop a different philosophy of creating value starting from parameters of real social utility. It is increasingly necessary, as the exhibition design seeks to show, to simplify in order to restore technology and costs to economy and efficiency. In the context of the Biennale, a large temporary event, care to reduce waste is a fundamental theme of the installation. In the Pavilion, the display reuses lighting equipment supplied for a previous art exhibition. The exhibit design retained some plasterboard partitions already installed, it reused the laminated wood panels of the Irish Pavilion at the Milan Expo. Likewise, the exhibition installation in the leisure space of the Giardino delle Vergini, designed by Luigi Greco and Mattia Paco Rizzi, was self-built reusing materials from the Irish Pavilion. A simple gesture, but consistent with what the exhibition aims to show in terms of a concern for resources.