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.