In 2025, the centenary of Luigi Pellegrin’s birth is marked by Luigi Pellegrin. Envisionings for Rome, an exhibition curated by Sergio Bianchi and Angela Parente and presented at MAXXI – National Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome. Drawing from the MAXXI Architecture Archives, the exhibition offers a comprehensive exploration of Pellegrin’s visionary work, with a special focus on his radical proposals for the future of Rome.

The exhibition concentrates on the final decade of Pellegrin’s career, during the 1990s, when the architect dedicated his research to imagining new urban scenarios for the Jubilee of 2000. Working primarily on Rome’s railway areas, Pellegrin envisioned large-scale infrastructural systems capable of reconnecting fragmented parts of the city while integrating services, public spaces, and ecological corridors. His proposals transcend the scale of individual buildings, addressing the city as a living organism and redefining the relationship between architecture, infrastructure, and territory.

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“Luigi Pellegrin. Envisionings for Rome”
December 17, 2025 – April 6, 2026
MAXXI
Via Guido Reni, 4a, Roma RM
Italy

Central to the exhibition is Pellegrin’s idea of using railway infrastructures as connective elements: Termini Station linked to the Baths of Diocletian, Tiburtina transformed into a strategic urban hinge, and stations evolving into elevated pedestrian networks extending across the city. Although these ambitious projects were never realized, they remain strikingly relevant and visionary today.

Alongside the Roman projects, Envisionings for Rome retraces Pellegrin’s broader intellectual and professional journey. Born in France in 1925 and raised in Rome, Pellegrin developed a deeply ethical and systemic approach to architecture, influenced by organic thinking and figures such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Sullivan, and Buckminster Fuller. His work spans from early “para-organic” buildings and experimental school architecture to megastructural visions, elevated habitats, and planetary-scale proposals that challenge anthropocentric models of development.

The exhibition also highlights Pellegrin’s extraordinary drawings—dense, dreamlike, and speculative—which form a crucial part of his archive. These works reveal an architecture that is not utopian, but profoundly pragmatic, seeking to reconcile human settlement with nature, technology, and the Earth’s surface.

Twenty-five years after they were conceived, Pellegrin’s visions for Rome resonate with renewed urgency. Luigi Pellegrin. Envisionings for Rome invites visitors to rediscover an interrupted path and to reflect on architecture’s role in shaping more integrated, sustainable, and imaginative futures for the city.