Marmomac Meets Academies

Raising a stone into an upright position was mankind’s first architectural gesture; an apparently simple yet in reality complex action in that it set in motion a transformation that turned the original nature of places into new landscapes; the landscape created by human artifice. Architecture is the offspring of that initial act: balancing stone after stone to adapt environmental conditions to human needs. And stone, more than any other material, brings about the continuous processes of territorial modification; especially in those areas where natural stone is more common and its use more extensive, to the point of interpreting the stratified identity in the history of the places where we live. This explains the continual prominence of a material that proves capable of going far beyond the evolution of its various expressive languages. Architecture is nothing more than continuous destroying to build again, and then destroying again to rebuild a new, without ever interrupting the principles and reasons for such actions.

The idea of the exhibition – set up in Hall 10 as part of The Plus Theatre – is to showcase the variety and richness of a widespread stone landscape, starting from a kind of “journey into the Italy of natural stone” capable of narrating quarry areas, the stratifications of urban landscapes and the experiments of scientific research by the various schools of architecture in Italy and abroad. This edition of Marmomac Meets Academies focuses on the concept of public space as investigated by universities and companies: from the enhancement of the historic tradition of Italian squares to the redevelopment of contemporary public spaces. Italy as a whole provides widespread testimony of the relationship between stone materials and the landscape, in urban and rural areas alike. From the Ligurian roofing slates, to paving in porphyry from Trentino (today used in most of the towns in all regions); from the highly-prized white marbles from the Apuan Alps (exported all over the world), to the historic travertines of ancient Rome and other found in central Italy; from the slabs from quarries in Lessinia to the luminous limestones of the cathedrals and castles in Apulia, the golden stones of the Sicilian Baroque, the lava stones of Etna and the robust and perennial granites of Sardinia.

The aim is to present an exemplary itinerary (between the stone districts and urban landscapes) of the Italian provinces together with leading Italian and international university experiments, including: University of Catania, University of Basilicata, “G. D’Annunzio” University of Chieti-Pescara, La Sapienza University in Rome, Bari Polytechnic University, University of Camerino, University of Ferrara, the Verona Academy of Fine Arts, Technische Universität Kaiserslautern:, New York Institute of Technology, Polis University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.