Something under construction is already a ruin.
A building is never complete. Everything is on a constant cycle of decay and renovation. Birth and Death.
In this city, the present contains the distant past and the faraway future.
It is a complex universe of architectural possibilities, containing the repertoire of everything that was done and yet to be done.
In this city, there are no monuments.
Drawing by Bruna Canepa.
"The Supreme Achievement", an exhibition born out of the collaboration between the London publisher Black Square Press and the space for architecture CAMPO, will open in Rome on Saturday the 12th of September 2015.
The curators Maria S. Giudici and Davide Sacconi invited 12 international architecture offices to formulate their position on the contemporary city through the elaboration of a narrative text and an evocative image. The contributions have become the briefs for a workshop in which students from several European Universities have been called to build 12 plaster models 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 "The Twelve Ideal Cities" published by Superstudio in 1971. Perfect and dystopian urban mechanisms where any incoherence is eliminated, they challenge the idea that space and bodily presence might not matter anymore in the future, while at the same time, they provide an ironic commentary on the architect’s curse; architects have to be projective and optimistic by default, even or maybe especially when civilization seems, in fact, to have come to an end.