Despite their constant under-representation on the public scene, in debates, exhibitions, commissions, prizes and juries, in Italy women architects are at the forefront of those who are trying to reinvent the architectural practice in search of a new alliance between building and living-without-violence, taking care of past wounds (inflicted on the territory). The aim of the talk "Architects of Resilience", organised on the occasion of the opening of the Italian Pavilion and curated by Marialuisa Palumbo together with RebelArchitette, was to present some of these female professionals, identifying in their design practice important acts of resilience. We collected these "fundamental acts" into four categories of projects: the redevelopment of urban areas and spaces, the recovery of industrial landscapes, the closing of the cycles of materials, and the rewriting of forms and common signs and sharing of traces (approaches, tools). Starting from the scale of urban and landscape, moving towards interior design, and then on to the world of design and online communication, here is an annotated list of the architects and the works we wish to draw attention to.
27 female architects who are changing Italy
At the Italian Pavilion, a generous talk curated by MariaLuisa Palumbo and RebelArchitette brought to light numerous women architects and their work of “resilience” in the field.
Patrizia Di Monte, Estonoeunsolar, Gravalosdimonte architetti, Saragoza
Patrizia Di Monte, Estonoeunsolar, Gravalosdimonte architetti, Saragoza
Patrizia Di Monte, Estonoeunsolar, Gravalosdimonte architetti, Saragoza
Redevelopment of the open spaces of the Piacentiniano Center of Bergamo.
Flanerie design group: Mariola Peretti, Luigino Pirola, Gianluca Gelmini, Simone Zenoni, Elena Franchioni, Carlo Peretti.
Assignment for winning the European design competition announced by the municipal administration. Work is underway on the first two lots.
Redevelopment of the open spaces of the Piacentiniano Center of Bergamo.
Flanerie design group: Mariola Peretti, Luigino Pirola, Gianluca Gelmini, Simone Zenoni, Elena Franchioni, Carlo Peretti.
Assignment for winning the European design competition announced by the municipal administration. Work is underway on the first two lots.
Redevelopment of the open spaces of the Piacentiniano Center of Bergamo.
Flanerie design group: Mariola Peretti, Luigino Pirola, Gianluca Gelmini, Simone Zenoni, Elena Franchioni, Carlo Peretti.
Assignment for winning the European design competition announced by the municipal administration. Work is underway on the first two lots.
SMALL, “PUBLIO”, traveling library on / in the public space. First installation: Triennale di Milano, 2017.
SMALL, Redevelopment of a system of public spaces in the district Libertà a Bari: corso Mazzini, piazza De Nicola, via Fieramosca. Bari, 2021.
SMALL, Redevelopment of a system of public spaces in the district Libertà a Bari: corso Mazzini, piazza De Nicola, via Fieramosca. Bari, 2021.
T SPOON, Olympic Village MMXIX, Rome, 2019
T SPOON, Olympic Village MMXIX, Rome, 2019
T SPOON, Olympic Village MMXIX, Rome, 2019
Orizzontale, Il ring, Aprilia (LT), 2021. Photo Nicola Barbuto
Orizzontale, Le Attività Integrate, Aprilia (LT, Italy) 2020. Photo Alessandro Vitali
Orizzontale, La piazza, Aprilia (LT, Italy) 2021. Photo Nicola Barbuto
Officina Meme Architetti, Darsena Pop Up, Ravenna, 2016, BD Studio (street artist GUE)
Officina Meme Architetti, Darsena Pop Up, Ravenna, 2016
Officina Meme Architetti, Darsena Pop Up, Ravenna, 2016
LandWorks, MAR-Miniera ARgentiera, 2018, @Veronica Zaru
LandWorks, MAR-Miniera ARgentiera, 2018, @Veronica Zaru
LandWorks, MAR-Miniera ARgentiera, 2018, @Veronica Zaru
Lucia Pierro - AutonomeForme (Lucia Pierro e Marco Scarpinato), Palazzo Greco alla Kalsa, Palermo, 2008-2015
Program: Residences, workshops and spaces for artists
Lucia Pierro - AutonomeForme (Lucia Pierro e Marco Scarpinato), Palazzo Greco alla Kalsa, Palermo, 2008-2015
Program: Residences, workshops and spaces for artists
Lucia Pierro - AutonomeForme (Lucia Pierro e Marco Scarpinato), Palazzo Greco alla Kalsa, Palermo, 2008-2015
Program: Residences, workshops and spaces for artists
LabF3, Azienda Agricola Contrada Bricconi, Oltressenda Alta (BERGAMO) 2013 - in progress
LabF3, Azienda Agricola Contrada Bricconi, Oltressenda Alta (BERGAMO) 2013 - in progress
LabF3, Azienda Agricola Contrada Bricconi, Oltressenda Alta (BERGAMO) 2013 - in progress
Arbau studio – Marta Baretti e Sara Carbonera, Centro Soranzo Addiction Care Centre, Forte Rossarol, Venice, 2013-2021 Photo Colin Dutton
Arbau studio – Marta Baretti e Sara Carbonera, Centro Soranzo Addiction Care Centre, Forte Rossarol, Venice, 2013-2021 Photo Orazio Pugliese
Arbau studio – Marta Baretti e Sara Carbonera, Centro Soranzo Addiction Care Centre, Forte Rossarol, Venice, 2013-2021
Photo Orazio Pugliese
Ricehouse, Casa UD, Chamois, 2016
Ricehouse, Casa UD, Chamois, 2016
Ricehouse, Casa UD, Chamois, 2016
Sara Lucietto
Sara Lucietto
Sara Lucietto
Marta Maccaglia-Semillas, Educational Centre In the native community of Union Altosanibeni, Pangoa, Satipo (Perú), 2018-2019
Marta Maccaglia-Semillas, Educational Centre In the native community of Union Altosanibeni, Pangoa, Satipo (Perú), 2018-2019
Marta Maccaglia-Semillas, Primary school in native community of Jerusalen de Miñaro, Pangoa, Satipo (Perú), 2016-2017
LYGA studio, Lycia Trapani e Gaia Trapani, Casa Zellige_Casa a SUD, Lampedusa 2019
LYGA studio, Lycia Trapani e Gaia Trapani, Casa Zellige_Casa a SUD, Lampedusa 2019
LYGA studio, Lycia Trapani e Gaia Trapani, Casa Zellige_Casa a SUD, Lampedusa 2019
Lara Sapp-OFFICINA82, StarsBOX® project. Photo Isabella Sassi Farias
Lara Sapp-OFFICINA82, StarsBOX® project. Photo Simone Mondino
Lara Sapp-OFFICINA82, StarsBOX® project. Photo Sergio Bolla
Donna colta affacciata alla finestra. Guardiana della capacità d'amare, con una certa apprensione lancia lo sguardo verso l'ignoto che si apre infinito fra lacerti di mondi popolati da architetture solide e vive. Cristina Senatore, collage, march 2019 In the photocollage there are: drawings by Ernst Haeckel (1904), fragment from the painting Fair Rosamund by J. W. Waterhouse (1917).
La stanza delle filatrici. Donne colte che filano Cristina Senatore, collage_marzo, 2019 In the photo collage there are: drawings by Ernst Haeckel (1904); Fragment of a miniature taken from a medieval text
Cristina Senatore, collage, marzo, 2019 In the photo collage there are: drawings by Ernst Haeckel (1904); detail from “Carità” *, oil on canvas by Lucas Cranach the Elder (1537 - 1550); fragments of photographs of landscapes taken from the web by unknown authors, one of them represents Craco, an abandoned town in the province of Matera. The painting is kept at the National Gallery in London, in it the theological virtue of Charity is depicted as a young mother nursing the youngest of her children, while the others are next to her, the child, clasping it to her chest with her right arm, holds in her arms a doll.
Studio Maria Martini, Itapava, Rio de Janeiro, 2017
Studio Maria Martini, Itapava, Rio de Janeiro, 2017
Studio Maria Martini, social
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- Marialuisa Palumbo, RebelArchitette
- 30 June 2021
- Padiglione Italia
These architects represent a cross-section of a presence and variety of approaches and possibilities that is certainly much greater and more extensive than what we were able to recount. However, in the modus operandi of these firms it is possible to read a way of doing business, of thinking the project, the client and the way to set up a building site, that has a low ecological impact and a high social impact. Architecture here is above all a meeting place, a means of caring, of rewriting, of transformation and recovery. Aside from the question of gender, this is the heart of a new way of making space. Browse the gallery to discover all the designers.
The talk "Architects of Resilience" was held during the opening days of Venice Architecture Biennale 2021, in the Italian Pavilion, curated by Marialuisa Palumbo and RebelArchitette, introduced by Alessandro Melis and moderated by Marialuisa Palumbo, Francesca Perani, Elena Fabrizi. The architects mentioned in this article were invited as a guests.
Let’s start with Patrizia Di Monte who, after founding the Grávalos-Di Monte studio in Zaragoza (Spain) with Ignacio Grávalos in 1998, in 2009 promoted and managed for the local council Estonoesunsolar ("this is not an abandoned space"), a plan for employment and involving citizens in the re-production of urban space, through the transformation of abandoned spaces into spaces for sitting, meeting and playing.
Flanerie design group: Mariola Peretti, Luigino Pirola, Gianluca Gelmini, Simone Zenoni, Elena Franchioni, Carlo Peretti.
Assignment for winning the European design competition announced by the municipal administration. Work is underway on the first two lots.
Mariola Peretti's proposal for the redevelopment of the public space in the centre of Bergamo is different, but equally focused on the need to build a dialogue between local government bodies, citizens and experts. It is a work in progress, a group effort, the result of winning a design competition, based on the idea that what we design are "layers" within a city that is "before and after" and of which this project will be but a moment of transition.
Flanerie design group: Mariola Peretti, Luigino Pirola, Gianluca Gelmini, Simone Zenoni, Elena Franchioni, Carlo Peretti.
Assignment for winning the European design competition announced by the municipal administration. Work is underway on the first two lots.
Flanerie design group: Mariola Peretti, Luigino Pirola, Gianluca Gelmini, Simone Zenoni, Elena Franchioni, Carlo Peretti.
Assignment for winning the European design competition announced by the municipal administration. Work is underway on the first two lots.
Moving from the north to the south, but still within the sphere of redevelopment of urban spaces, Rossella Ferorelli, co-founder in 2011 of the cultural platform studio SMALL based in Bari and Milan, overturns the established balance between informal parking and public and pedestrian spaces in her urban redevelopment project for Corso Mazzini and Piazza De Nicola in the Libertà district in Bari, redesigning the street section, seating areas and tree-lined walkways.
TSPOON studio, founded in 2006 by Nina Artioli, Alessandra Glorialanza and Eliana Saracino, works on a scale ranging from temporary installations to territorial master plans, through participatory design processes and publishing initiatives. Through the project for the redevelopment of the urban area of the Olympic Village in Rome, it carries on its research on the relationship between public space and urban density, or the quantity of people and activities needed to create urban vitality.
The reactivation of shared spaces through the construction of "urban machines" capable of triggering new possibilities for use and crossing, is at the heart of the practice of the Roman collective Orizzontale, founded in 2010, of which Margherita Manfra and Nasrin Mohiti Asli are members. In the participatory redevelopment of the Toscanini public housing estate in Aprilia, the unfinished square is finally handed over to the city, through a process (which has just been completed) that involved the citizens in two years of collective construction.
Moving on to the second category, i.e. the recovery of former industrial spaces, places of extraction, production, or military control, in the colourful Darsena PopUp, a temporary reuse intervention rooted in Ravenna's port identity carried out in 2016 by Officina Meme, of architects Maria Cristina Garavelli, Lara Bissi, Elisa Greco and Cristina Bellini, the inclusion of sports and recreational spaces brings new life to the Darsena at all hours of the day, thanks to a new functional heterogeneity.
Close to the extraordinary waters of the north-western tip of Sardinia, the reinvention of a lead, zinc and iron mine, abandoned in the early 1960s with its characteristic wood and stone structures, is at the heart of Landworks and Paola Serrittu's proposal for the mining village of Argentiera (2019). The aim here is to transform a centre for artistic and educational experimentation from temporary to permanent, combining the university's training with museum activities, guided tours, festivals and cultural marketing
Program: Residences, workshops and spaces for artists
The recovery of the Ionian salt pans in Reggio Calabria and those of Monastir in Tunisia, the areas of the former Italcementi of Catania and Bagnoli in Naples, and the area of the former NATO base in Comiso near Ragusa are at the heart of "Resilient Landscapes", research laboratory for the reactivation of Temporarily Abandoned Areas, run by Lucia Pierro and Marco Scarpinato, founders in 1998 of the Palermo-based studio AutonomeForme.
Program: Residences, workshops and spaces for artists
Program: Residences, workshops and spaces for artists
LabF3 studio, run by Francesca Favero, Caterina Franco and Anna Frigerio, began in 2013 a process of re-functionalization of a mountain farmstead into a holiday farm in the mountains of Bergamo. A graduate project, sensitive to the places and to the processes of transformation and production rooted there, capable of relaunching a slow-paced tourism in harmony with nature.
The architecture of care, an architecture aimed at providing quality by carefully restoring existing resources, especially in low-budget projects, is at the heart of the proposal by studio Arbau, of Marta Baretti and Sara Carbonera, and in particular the transformation, begun in 2013 and still in progress, of a former military area not far from Venice into a centre of excellence for the treatment of addiction disorders.
Considering now the reuse of materials and more generally the optimisation of available resources in closed reproductive cycles and short supply chains, Tiziana Monterisi with the start-up "RiceHouse", founded in 2016, transforms waste from rice cultivation into building materials: wooden and rice straw frames, thermo-plaster, lolla-lime finishes, mortars and lightwight screeds. Materials suitable for all types of construction and capable of producing healthy buildings: from the grain to the house, from agriculture to architecture.
Sara Lucietto, a bricklayer with a background in interior design, has a very similar approach. Since 2015 she has been building houses out of natural and self-produced materials with her company "Terra e Paglia", together with Sanni Mezzasoma, sharing all the phases of construction in ecological forms of self-construction, involving not only other professionals but anyone who wants to get their hands dirty and literally build their own house. A smiling "gentle revolution" that starts with earth and straw to make "big things", like a house.
Marta Maccaglia's approach is different but very close. Since 2011 she has been in Peru, where she founded the organization Semillas ("seeds"), an NGO with the mission of building schools for the most remote areas and populations of the Amazon, believing that education is the only true seed to build equality, democracy and the future.
Moving on to the fourth and last of the categories we have identified, that of the rewriting of forms and sharing of traces, that is, of design as the stratification of ancient and local traditions but also as a sampling, manipulation and relaunching of information in the world wide web. This is the category where we place the poetic, Mediterranean experience of the architectural interiors by sisters Lycia and Gaia Trapani, who, with Lyga Studio, reuse traditional materials and techniques to create intimate residential spaces that synthesize the Sicilian tradition in a contemporary key.
Re-writing or stratification based on pre-existing realities is the work on drawing by Cristina Senatore. For example, in Scenari Futuri, a series of collages from 2019, the drawings of biologist Ernst Haeckel become "architectural natures", shells suspended in interstellar space or on the sand of dark, desert planets, telling us of a post-catastrophe elsewhere, but also of continuity and survival, and of a new centrality of "wise and resilient" women.
Finally, with Mariana Martini, and her activity between Italy, Brazil and the web, we look at the short circuit between design and social media. Martini combines her work as an architect of "tropical interiors" (welcoming you back from work and the urban environment, giving you the feel of "entering a hotel in Bali") with the training and continuous updating of young professionals through her very popular Instagram activity. A process of sharing professional practice in the sense of business management, not only in the control and tools of the project, but also in the relationship with the client.