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  • Recycle and/or Restore:"Re-Cycle: Strategies for Architecture, City, and Planet," Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI secolo (MAXXI)
  • Damiana Lucia Paternò (bio)

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Music on Bones, unknown, former USSR, 1946-1960.

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Recycling is one of the "eight Rs" that Serge Latouche, the French economist and philosopher, suggests as the basis for "sustainable degrowth."1 Together with reevaluation, reconceptualization, restructuring, relocalization, redistribution, reduction, and reuse, recycling can help to overcome the current growth model, which is revealing its limits and weaknesses in these complex times.

It is also the key concept of "Re-Cycle: Strategies for Architecture, City, and Planet," an exhibition at Rome's Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI secolo (MAXXI), which opened in December 2011 and closed on April 29th, 2012. The exhibition was curated by Pippo Ciorra, with a scientific committee that included Reinier de Graaf, Sara Marini, Mosè Ricci, Jean-Philippe Vassal, and Paola Viganò.

At the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2006, the "Shrinking Cities" research project highlighted a profound crisis in contemporary ideas of urban development, underscoring the disconcerting results of a tendency to abandon the new that has governed the last few decades. Deconstructing, reevaluating, reorganizing, and imagining were the four points of view suggested for the development of new planning tools. In this project, recycling was interpreted as one of the possibilities offered by the wider strategy of reevaluating the spatial and physical components of the contemporary city that are no longer in use.

The "Action" exhibition, organized at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in 2008, investigated recycling from a different perspective: that of the people who experience the urban environment every day. It focused on four actions—recycling, walking, gardening, and playing—that inform the myriad micro-transformations that often spontaneously occur in cities. In this exhibit, recycling was seen as a reflection on society's waste and as a premise for the exploration of new urban potential.

The word "recycle" becomes "upcycle" in William McDonough and Michael Braungart's Cradle to Cradle (2002).2 In this case, it means a way to plan new things, designing all parts from scratch according to a nonlinear cyclic life process. [End Page 113] This process eliminates waste: materials are continuously transformed from one state to another, with almost no loss of energy.

These exhibits considered recycling as a strategy, an action, and a creative operation; elsewhere, its more complex consequences have also been taken into account. In 2010, in the Belgian pavilion at the Venice Biennale, the Rotor collective exhibited several modern building materials characterised by wear. Pieces of concrete, aluminium plates, melamine-coated panels, and whole lengths of red carpet were hung on the walls as if they were works of art. Thus, the curators directed the viewer's attention to the fact that twentieth-century building materials, in contrast to traditional materials such as stone or wood, are often considered damaged and unusable as soon as they start to show some weathering.

Also at the 2010 Venice Biennale, Rem Koolhaas debuted his "Cronocaos" exhibition (later presented at New York's New Museum). The exhibition was meant to be his personal provocation, a "manifesto" on preservation, and a stimulus to think about the management of heritage buildings—in particular, the protection of twentieth-century architectural testimonies. Koolhaas's initiative, however, is only the latest chapter in an international debate that began in the 1970s. Since then, architectural theory has shifted from the idea of "creative destruction" as the basis of any project to that of a reuse of existing structures, thought of as resources. In the 1980s, through the pages of Casabella architectural magazine, Bernardo Secchi highlighted that the development conditions of cities had already changed.3 Vittorio Gregotti agreed with him in a leading article titled "Modificazione," in which he stated that the future of architecture, and Italian architecture in particular, would reside in changing what already exists.4 Although he assigned a central role to urban planning, Gregotti maintained (in the wake of philosopher Ernesto Nathan Rogers) that past and present are not two separate things but part of a continuity.

Ciorra's "Re-Cycle" exhibition starts...

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