Restless Architecture

Volume edited on the occasion of the exhibition at MAXXI - Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo in Rome from 25 October 2024 to 16 March 2025, curated by the world-renowned studio Diller Scofidio + Renfro. The exhibition and thus the catalogue intends to address the theme of movement not so much as a possibility for a building to move from one place to another as an internal property of architecture: buildings that change configuration, that have mobile elements, that swell or turn to accommodate more or fewer visitors. The ability to move or change like a transformer is also a recurring feature of the work of Diller and Scofidio (later DS+R), who often also used movement as a platform to connect art and architecture, combining the concepts of building and installation in an experimental (and very productive) way. In their vision, architecture eschews geo-fixity, rigidity, definition, conditioning, immediacy, passivity and stupidity. The new cornerstones of Restless Architecture are mobility, flexibility, expansion, setting, renewability, machinism and intelligence.