Nàbito Architects — Exhibition Opening & Lecture 5 of October
Valle Giulia, Faculty of Architecture, La Sapienza Rome.
FLOATING is an exhibition about open process in architecture and design. At the beginning of a project in the studio, there is an explosion of ideas floating in space —sketches, drawings, words, creative concepts — like a big bang, the origin of the process. These fragments move, come closer, drift apart, interlock like a puzzle: they remain indeterminate, taking shape without ever being exhausted, an infinite source of inspiration. They are used, forgotten, and return; at a certain point they materialize into executive projects, then into construction sites, and finally into buildings or built spaces — but can we truly call them concluded processes? We believe not.
Architecture continues to float, at the mercy of multiple factors: environmental, climatic, historical, tied to the passage of time. Sometimes spaces and architectural artifacts change meaning while retaining their signifier — their resonance — while their function or form shifts over time.
We can understand how a process begins, but — and this is the most fascinating part — we do not know how it will end, because indeterminacy persists even after we are gone. Rome is the clearest example of this.
The exhibition thus represents all of this: fragments of ideas floating in space, physical fragments of sketches and drawings of different shapes hung at varying heights along the perimeter of the black cubes, staging the space in an aesthetic and artistic way. Between the cubes, digital projections create a contrast between the physicality of the drawing and the ephemerality of the digital, illustrating the projects from rendering tovideo, to photographs of the completed works. The different scales of intervention will not be represented uniformly or in order: every project, regardless of scale, is guided by the same creative process — from the design of a light switch to that of an entire urban complex — we want to express the same shared operative optimism and the same creative lightness and joy.