Architecture, Silence and Light, Exhibition, MAXXI, Rome: 18 December 2019-2 June 2020

This is archived material. It is for reference purposes only.

Starting on the 18th December 2019, the MAXXI (National Museum of the Arts of the XXI century) hosts the exhibition "Architecture, Silence and Light: Louis Kahn in the photographs of Roberto Schezen".

The exhibition presents the corpus realised by Milanese photographer Roberto Schezen. Divided into two parts, the exhibition covers Kahn's main projects: from the Indian Institute of Management of Ahmedabad to the Kimbell Art Museum of Forth Worth, from the Phillips Exeter Library in New Hampshire to the National Assembly of Dhaka.

Light, shadow, silence and order, paradigms common to architecture and photography, are to all effects elements of the design lexicon of one of the masters of 20th century architecture, Louis I. Kahn. The lens of Roberto Schezen, who certainly admired him and who found in his projects an opportunity to reflect on his research, absorbs and returns the lesson through the photographic image.

The long initial wall - with reproductions made starting from the 6x6 color slides - is imagined as a visual path released from the description of the single project. Here the long shadows cast by Kahn's buildings and the blacks, deep and hollow, which draw the facades, start a path that from silent moves towards the light and the wonder of monumentality. The more classic shots, which reflect the changing luministic qualities of space and the rigorous design research of the American architect, alternate with “reckless” visions and alienating details, in which Schezen's interpretation appears more free and experimental.

The interior of the room is dedicated to the physical materials that make up the Fund: in the display case, divided into projects, the archive prints made by the author are presented, together with the black and white negatives, the 6x6 slides and the 35mm slides with inscriptions autograph. Here the language of black and white, used sometimes in an expressionistic way by Schezen, investigates the germinative function of the shadow, counterpart of light in architecture as the negative with the positive in photography.

The silence in which the spaces photographed by Schezen are immersed, always taken in the absence of people, is interrupted only by Kahn's thoughts: dense as programmatic posters but as light as short lyrics, his texts enrich the path of a further reading level, creating resonances between words and images that seem to expand the space of the exhibition.

Architecture, Silence and Light, Exhibition, MAXXI, Rome: 18 December 2019-2 June 2020
Architecture, Silence and Light, Exhibition, MAXXI, Rome: 18 December 2019-2 June 2020
Architecture, Silence and Light, Exhibition, MAXXI, Rome: 18 December 2019-2 June 2020
Architecture, Silence and Light, Exhibition, MAXXI, Rome: 18 December 2019-2 June 2020
Architecture, Silence and Light, Exhibition, MAXXI, Rome: 18 December 2019-2 June 2020
Architecture, Silence and Light, Exhibition, MAXXI, Rome: 18 December 2019-2 June 2020

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