What kind of houses do we live in? How do today’s architects design our homes? How have notions of housing changed over the last generation? This exhibition analyses investigations and answers to these questions through the work of several architects.

Garagem Sul at Centro Cultural de Belém—the Lisbon gallery dedicated to architecture—presents the exhibition « At Home: Projects for Contemporary Housing », which will run from April 16 to September 5. Originally presented at the MAXXI, the National Museum of XXI Century Arts collection in Rome, the show is an invitation to reflect on the houses we live in. How do today’s architects design our homes and how have notions of housing changed over the last generation? This exhibition analyses the investigations and answers to these questions through the work of several architects.

Practical information

« At Home. Projects for Contemporary Housing »
April 16, 2021 – September 5, 2021
Garagem Sul do Centro Cultural de Belém
Praça do Império, Lisbon
Portugal

Based on the MAXXI, the National Museum of XXI Century Arts collection in Rome, the exhibition moves from small-scale shelters to large collective housing projects, revealing complex and hybrid experiences that bear witness to the new relationship between individuals and communities.

The exhibition takes pairs of projects as its starting point, in which original materials from the archive of Italian architects provide a revealing counterpoint for works of contemporary architects. In Lisbon, the pairs presented in Rome are complemented by Portuguese examples, which expand the meaning and readings arising from the materials presented.

From individual dwellings where a greater degree of experimentation was possible thanks to the freedom allowed by the theme and the client, to parts of the city where the experience of the individual is related to the size of the community.

At all scales, architectural housing projects are an opportunity to think about the forms and materials of architecture, in close relation with nature or inserted into the urban fabric, and to respond to the desires of individual clients well aware of their role or as a result of public construction policies.

The leitmotiv of the exhibition is a constant dialogue between the work of architects of previous generations with those of more recent generations, now complemented with Portuguese examples: projects that are distant in time and space, but which evoke equivalent notions in terms of the methods used, their relationship with the contexts in which they were constructed and in the formal investigation that inspired them. While formal and immaterial comparison between works opens up new clues for their understanding and discovery, above all, such comparison highlights the variety and complexity of contemporary housing spaces and the potential of architecture to constantly reinvent them.