Pier Luigi Nervi Architecture for Sports exhibition

The architecture for sports Pier Luigi Nervi produced over the course of his long career, from the first stadium he built in Florence in 1929 to the 1968 Kuwait Sports Centre, are the focus of an exhibition opening today, February 5, at Maxxi in Rome.
A series of photographic panels illustrating the Italian engineer’s most famous projects welcome visitors and introduce the exhibition, which is divided into three sections: Experimentation and innovation (1929-1949), The champion of concrete (1950-1960), and From Italy to the world (1961/79).
The exhibition includes photographs, documents and original drawings from the Pier Luigi Nervi Archive and the collections of the Maxxi Architecture Archive Centre along with four models made by the architecture modelling workshops (LaMo and LaMoVIDA) at the University of Bologna.

In the first section, Giovanni Berta stadium in Florence provides the starting point for investigation of the research into technical aspects and design that put the Italian engineer on the map in international architectural debate. The second section is about his projects for the 1960 Rome Olympics and the Kursaal baths in Ostia, featuring the famous diving board. These were the buildings that brought Nervi to the world’s attention, representing how his way of working and formal inventiveness were closely linked with his construction expertise. The last section of the exhibition features projects built in different parts of the world, such as the Good Hope Centre in Cape Town (1964 -1980), which was not only the world’s biggest concrete dome at the time but the first multiracial sports facility in South Africa, still under apartheid.

(Agnese Bifulco)

Title: Pier Luigi Nervi Architetture per lo Sport (Architecture for Sports)
curated by Micaela Antonucci with Annalisa Trentin and Tomaso Trombetti
Dates: 5 February - 2 October 2016
Location: MAXXI – National museum of 21st century arts - Rome - Italy

Images courtesy of Maxxi
www.fondazionemaxxi.it

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