Drawings and Projects
Antonia Jannone Architecture Gallery

During the Milan Design Week 2019, 2A+P/A architectural studio presented the exhibition “Drawings and Projects” in the historic Antonia Jannone architectural gallery. A collection of projects, images, illustrations and photographs brought together in the gallery’s spaces to portray the poetic research of the studio. The gallery layout has played with the juxtaposition of the two bodies of work. One wall hosted the series called “36 drawings”, first created for the Orléans Biennale and commissioned by the Frac Centre-Val de Loire. The opposite wall instead presented a selection of projects chosen to exemplify the type of work undertaken by 2A+P/A during its ten years of activity: finished work, competition projects, exhibition pavilions and installations.

36 Drawings
1st Biennale d’Architecture d’Orléans

2A+P/A has curated the first exhibition host by the Cabinet of Curiosities pavilion, designed and built for the Biennale in Orléans. The series of drawings is a visual essay that exposes our idea of architecture in its intimate form. Artworks, images, objects, built or unbuilt architectures, archetypes are indifferently assumed as projects and juxtaposed to create a storyboard of unexpected encounters and unpredictable meanings. Each element of the collection is detached by its own material, spatial and temporal context by being redrawn and therefore re-appropriated to construct a cabinet of obsessions. The drawings are integrated in the architecture by entirely covering the wall, like a fresco that tells a choral story of temptations. 

SAVAGE ARCHITECTURE
Solo Traveling Exhibition

The recent collaboration between Gian Piero Frassinelli (member of the Florentine collective Superstudio) and 2A+P/A (architectural practice based in Rome) relaunches the debate on the relationship between architecture and anthropology. The traveling exhibition was curated by Davide Sacconi and exhibited first at Architectural Association in London from in February 2016, and then reaches Kent State University in Florence, Polytechnic of Milan, Foundation Civa in Bruxelles, Temple University in Rome, StudioLo in Berlin. The exhibition is accompanied by a book published by Balck Square, which is available from the AA Bookshop. Apart from the hosting institutions, Savage Architecture was presented and debated also at the Italian Cultural Institute in London and Berlin.

CAMPO
Space for promotion of architecture in Rome

CAMPO is a space to debate, study and celebrate architecture, born in Rome out of the collaboration between Gianfranco Bombaci, Matteo Costanzo, Luca Galofaro e Davide Sacconi.
CAMPO invites researchers, professionals and students to expose projects, experiments and researches that challenge the current understanding of the city, and to collaborate in the investigation of the potential and the limits of architecture as a form of collective production and common knowledge

Visit CAMPO website

THE POP OUT SHOW
Solo Exhibition

The Pop Out Show was the first solo exhibition of 2A+P/A in Rome, curated by Peter T. Lang and Patrizia Ferri and hosted in the Hyunnart Gallery, in 2010.
The exhibition was an event included in the first edition of Architecture Festival in Rome “Index Urbis“, curated by Francesco Garofalo, sponsored by Istituto Nazionale di Architettura IN/Arch Lazio and supported in communication by Image.

Savage Architecture
or the City of Collective Rituals
Royal College of Art – ADS 10

Savage Architecture becomes a Architecture Design Studio (n.10) at RCA. ADS 10 departs on a journey toward the very reason of architecture, guided by an anthropological gaze in questioning the relationship between architecture and man. The Studio has the ambition to verify whether architecture, as a discipline, can still challenge norms and behaviours imposed by the present urban condition and thus reclaim a meaning for contemporary practice.
If architecture is a form of knowledge in its own right rather than a problem-solving practice, the design method turns into an epistemological problem. In other words to formulate an architectural project is to construct and represent a body of ideas and meanings: a world and a specific system of understanding it.
ADS10 proposes propose the Archive as a conceptual and methodological tool to construct constellations of forms and information to which the architectural project is called to give form, representation and organization.
More info at: Royal College of Art

Everything Out the door
CAMPO

Everything out the door is a project born out of the collaboration between the publisher Black Square Press and the space for architecture CAMPO. The curators invited 9 international architecture offices to put forward their own idea for a Dream Bed. In 10 images commented with 10 short texts, our architect contributors communicated their take on the ideal bedroom, intended as the minimum space through which we can construct an idea of architecture. Objets trouvés, personal cabinets of curiosities, speculative projects: these 10 images construct visual essays of sorts on what we left out the door – and what we wish to bring back in to challenge our lives and conventions. These contributions have become the briefs for a workshops in which students from several European Universities have been called to build 9 models of rooms as devices that, from the domestic scale, could trigger the urban visions. The idea of the exhibition and the workshop, together with a publication that will collect the results, originates from the project Dream Beds published by Archizoom in 1967.

Interior Tales – Happy Together
TU Munich

“Happy Together” concentrates subtlety on the attempt to understand how many ways to live collectively we have achieved in our modern condition. The research verifies a wide spectrum of cases, from the detached villa until the artificial planet, using fiction as a lens to analyze reality: the description of the interior organization of the flying base for an army of clones in Star Wars, the Death Star, opens a debate on the social structure in the project of an entire planned planet; the difficulties in sharing day life between two lovers, Frida Kalo and Diego Rivera, whose house is split in two parts linked just by a small bridge and immersed in a surreal and exotic landscape, is the occasion to talk about the troubles in sharing spaces between two strong personalities.

Spring week 2017
KU Leuven in Ghent

The Faculty of Architecture, Campus Sint-Lucas is working each year on an annual project ‘Spring week’ where all the students of architecture and interior architecture from the Bachelor degree are working together in groups of 4 to 5 students creating an inspiring project. A total of 800 students was joining this challenging exercise working day and night to achieve a satisfying result.The Ghentian workers’ house were the subject be reconsidered. It had been designed as an intimate, compact and efficient space. In order that it liberates space in the city for what we want to do together. A shared space, a generous space, an urban common. The end result of this week was a 120m long scale model (scale 1:10) that will was standing in the hallway of the abbey. This model will showed the variation and richness of connecting different ideas in one ‘endless street’.

Real Estate Summer School
University of Liege

The workshop was developed with the intention of testing new forms of collective life, new ways of living together. The idea was to erase each element and partition that is present within these apartment blocks to build a kind of continuous interior space. Objects and devices that will allow a collective life will the colonize this series of spaces. In this sense the “bed “, as the unit and ultimate form of intimacy, had been the crucial tool.
see the workshop website

Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture.
A monographic work on a theoretical book
Cornell University in Rome

The course Architecture and Analysis II: Architecture, the city and landscape, led by Matteo Costanzo and Luca Galofaro, was focused on the Robert Venturi’s book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, to celebrate both its 50th anniversary from the publication and the value that it still has in interpreting our contemporary condition. Through a work of composition and recomposition of its parts, students analyses and worked on a selection of projects in Rome that are included in the book. 

Nothing Left to Design
Campo

Black Square and CAMPO asked a group of architects (among which Andrea Branzi, Sam Jacob, and Elia Zenghelis) to imagine and describe through a brief narrative text the architecture that could give form and place to those rituals and desires. These scripts became the basis for a set of narrative drawings developed during a workshop at CAMPO within which architecture students tried to give form – as Sottsass would say – spaces designed by others. For a week, we gathered in Rome, working on these translations from text to image, and exploring and documenting those places where sacred and profane rituals and ceremonies are celebrated in Rome today, from the football stadium to the Mouth of Truth, from St. Peter to the Trevi Fountain.
see the workshop website

Unbuilt Rome
University of Miami in Rome

The Rome studio had been focused on the construction of an imaginary Rome through the study of 9 buildings designed for the city, but which had not been built. A sort of “analogue city” made of those buildings, which had defined the image of the city although they had never been built.The aim of the studio was to explore and verify a sort of hidden heritage inside the city of Rome, considering that the image of the city is built by means of realized and destroyed architecture, but also of those building that “would” have been. The task of the students will be the re-design of these selected buildings inside the contemporary Rome, following few “evidences”, which we gave as documentation. 

Interior Tales – Urban Rooms
University of Miami in Rome

The course intended to analyze specific urban spaces of the city of Rome through the potential of some specific movie scenes. Considering fiction as model of space, the course proposed an experimental process of translation from the cinematographic to the architectural space. The idea is to push the visionary power of certain movie sequences in order to explore the transformative potential of the interior space, intended in this case as urban rooms: squares, public interiors, promenades. The course had been developed inside the frame of the Elective course at University of Miami in rome.  Interiors Tales – Urban Rooms involved students in the process of designing urban spaces inspired by famous scenes in films. Nine different sections were born from this collaboration: Roman Holidays, Ben Hur, La dolce vita, The last man on earth, Way of the dragon, The belly of an architect, Steven Soderbergh, Ocean’s twelve, Angels and demons, The Great beauty.

Interior Tales
Syracuse University in London

The workshop has been developed inside the frame of the Housing vs City symposium that was organised by Francisco Sanin and Davide Sacconi for the Department of Architecture at Syracuse University in London.  Interiors Tales  involved students in the process of designing urban spaces inspired by famous scenes in films. Eight different sections were born from this collaboration, each one is like a sample, a sort of reverse engineering between different forms of art, which want to share an idea of storytelling made of spaces, through visual and spatial fragments in the films Mon Oncle (1958), The Great Escape (1963), Playtime (1967), The Holy Mountain (1973), Tron (1982), The Truman Show (1988), Anonymous (2001) and The Dark Knight (2008).

Have a look to a review of the workshop on Abitare.

Interior Tales is also now a book published by Black Square Press.