“Giovanni Maciocco - Inhabiting the Territory”: an exhibition at La Sapienza for the Gallura engineer and architect

From Sardinia to Rome: the exhibition “Giovanni Maciocco - Abitare il territorio / Inhabiting the Territory”, will be inaugurated on Wednesday 7 May at 6 pm at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Rome La Sapienza. It is the second stop of a traveling exhibition dedicated to the engineer and architect of Gallura origin, founder of the School of Architecture of Alghero, awarded the IN/Architettura Sardegna Lifetime Achievement Award in 2023.

The opening to the public will be preceded by a lecture by Professor Giovanni Maciocco. Introduction and greetings by Professor Orazio Carpenzano, Dean of the Faculty of Architecture and Professor Antonino Saggio. The exhibition will remain open until May 27, 2025, from Monday to Friday, from 8:30 to 19:30.

The second stage of a journey

Curated by Professor Antonello Marotta of the University of Sassari, with the organization by Claudia Ricciardi, the exhibition continues the reflection started a year ago at the Archaeological Museum of Olbia with the exhibition dedicated to Maciocco and the catalog edited by Antonello Marotta himself and Paola Mura, on the initiative of IN/Arch Sardegna and ANCE Sardegna, in collaboration with the University of Sassari.

"This is a milestone of great importance for our associations, which have been committed to promoting quality in architecture for years," commented Andrea Casciu and Pierpaolo Tilocca, presidents of IN/Arch and Ance Sardegna. "The exhibition "Giovanni Maciocco - Abitare il territorio" crosses regional borders, awaiting the European stages envisaged by the program, and the Catalogue has been re-edited by the publishing house "Ance Servizi" which, since 1967, has published "L'Industria delle Costruzioni", a prestigious magazine in the sector. It is a confirmation of the cultural value of the initiative. A special thanks - concludes Casciu - goes to Giovanni Maciocco, "our" IN/Architettura 2023 award, for what he taught us and for the honour he has done us in accompanying us in this initiative".

The Sardinian jury of IN/Arch and Ance, chaired by architect Giuseppe Vallifuoco, awarded the lifetime achievement prize to Giovanni Maciocco also for “the ability to start from the reality of a peculiar and sometimes marginal territory such as Sardinia to build a more general reflection on the methods and practices of contemporary design, which takes on a paradigmatic value even for different and not necessarily analogous contexts”.

Maciocco: «Restlessness and research»

Born in Olbia in 1946, Giovanni Maciocco graduated in Engineering in Pisa in 1970 and subsequently in Architecture in Florence in 1974. He taught at the Polytechnic of Bari and at the Universities of Pisa, Cagliari and Sassari where he was awarded the title of professor emeritus. His projects and reflections on architecture and the environment, whether natural or shaped by history and man, have been published in specialized magazines and volumes, including monographs, in Italy and abroad, as well as presented in prestigious exhibitions. Among the many, the Sixth International Architecture Biennial in Venice.

The exhibition that opens on Wednesday will present, with an evocative installation also with technological aids, projects, photographs of the works created and drawings. «It is not a retrospective», the architect and professor is keen to underline, but a stage in an eternal path of research: «You always have to question yourself». At 78 years old, «the worries remain. Controlled but not too much».

The real project? «In the challenge beyond the limit»

For his students (he teaches in the first year of the School of Architecture in Alghero) Giovanni Maciocco draws by hand on various supports, even on the digital board: «It allows me to enlarge or reduce at will. To find clues of habitability at scales that we are not used to using». The digital board supports a propensity «to start from something small to arrive at something large». To overturn (in the words of an urban planner, as well as a designer) the canonical relationship between the Plan and the Project. But drawing is never an end in itself. Woe betide anyone who makes it «an instrument of self-satisfaction, that way we remain on the side of communication. Drawing must be brought back into the scope of the project».

But above all, we need to dare more, in the studio and on the building site. "There is a great responsibility in making a sign that will become something material, concrete," warns Maciocco. "If I draw without daring, tying myself only to tradition, but escaping the risks of reality, I am not really designing. The real project is not born in the comfort zone, but in the challenge beyond the limit."

(Online Union)