Technotopia: Engineering the Present and the Future

-Architects’ voices from all over the world - A conscious look that merges past and future - Fully illustrated with images and plans Catalogue of the TECHNOTOPIA exhibition, which will be held at MAXXI in 2022, focusing on the relationship between artistic and scientific disciplines, nowadays closer than ever, and the consequent contacts between technique, creativity and social awareness. Architecture, engineering and science have overlapped on numerous occasions during the 20th century. First in the heroic phase and then in the mature phase of the reinforced concrete, then with the affirmation of hi-tech construction methods in the 1970s and 1980s and finally with the irruption of digitally controlled technologies. TECHNOTOPIA explores this alliance, responding to MAXXI’s mission to look towards the future of our planet and the disciplines that modify its spaces. The volume follows the dual register of the exhibition, first dealing with how technology is making architecture, urban planning and other related disciplines more aware of their technical and scientific responsibility and capable of opening up new lines of research. The focus shifts then to structural engineering, comparing current masterpieces with previous historical modernist examples.

Maristella Casciato is Associate Professor of History of Architecture at the Aldo Rossi Faculty of Architecture, University of Bologna. Member of the ICOMOS 20th Century Heritage International Scientific Committee. Curator of the Architecture Exhibitions and Archives section at MAXXI in Rome, she has also been appointed Senior Curator of Architectural Collections at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Pippo Ciorra is Professor of Design at the School of Architecture in Ascoli Piceno. He is coordinator of the international research doctorate VDH and member of CICA. He has been working with several magazines, newspapers and for the National radio since 1981. He has published essays, research papers and monographic studies. Since May 2010 he is Senior Curator at MAXXI Architettura in Rome.