Ignazio Gardella Architetto
Costruire le modernità

The exhibition featuring Ignazio Gardella (1905-1999), promoted and organized by the University of Genoa’s Faculty of Architecture, with the involvement of DIPARC – the Department of Architectural Design and Construction – and the Genoa City Council, in agreement with the Ministry of Cultural Heritage’s DARC and located in the undercroft of the Palazzo Ducale, intends to celebrate the centenary of the architect’s birth, proposing a new interpretation of his long career as an architectural designer and lecturer. Within the exhibition in Genoa, the architecture of Ignazio Gardella constitutes the starting point for critical reflection with objective of grasping the ways of interpreting context utilised by the architect. Seen in this light, each building, and the entire Gardellian oeuvre in general, takes on an extraordinary relevance in relation to the capacity to affect and transform the city in a reciprocal exchange between the elements of architectural construction and the urban morphology. The diverse sections of the exhibition investigate the specific urban contexts in which the architect worked during the course of his long career and which are taken as true foundations of a design itinerary that highlighted the relationship between architecture and the city as its defining focus. Alessandria, Milan, Genoa and Venice emerge from an architectural output widely distributed across Italy given that in their urban and architectural structure they reveal a patrimony of stratifications and memories which the architect interpreted in a manner that went well beyond the confines of a rediscovered relationship between contemporary architecture and “environmental preexistences”. The cities, their history, their materials, their settlement patterns and cultural and physical state, therefore constitute the basis of the exhibition, the pillars of a project that, departing from the demands of a conventional and shared modernity, go beyond the margins of a known idiom to reach the interior of a territory as original as it is autochthonous. In this sense the figure of Gardella takes on that particular connotation that sees his work as the best contribution to an “Italian” route towards the forms of the modern.

Scientific care
Rafael Moneo

Coordination
Marco Casamonti

Sections curators
Prologo
curated by Michela Rosso;
Alessandria
curated by di Marco Casamonti with Guido Montanari;
Milano
curated by Antonio Monestiroli with Federico Bucci e Stefano Guidarini;
Genova
curated by Bruno Gabrielli with Simona Gabrielli;
Venezia
curated by Luciano Semerani with Antonella Gallo;
Vicenza
curated by Daniele Vitale with Angelo Lorenzi.

Exhibition design
Franz Prati

Catalogo
Electa, Milano

Internet site
www.mostragardella.unige.it www.palazzoducale.genova.it Organization by DIPARC (Dipartimento di Progettazione e Costruzione dell’Architettura), Palazzo Ducale

Press office
Palazzo Ducale, Genova Camilla Talfani, +39 010 5574012 ctalfani@palazzoducale.genova.it

Organizational secretary
DIPARC, Eleonora Burlando +39 2095867 / +39 339 3903606 eleonoraburlando@libero.it

ACMA Communication
ACMA Centro Italiano di Architettura
Via Antonio Grossich 16 - 20131 Milano
Tel +39 02 70639293 Fax +39 02 70639761
www.acmaweb.com acma@acmaweb.com

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