Neri & Hu: Traversing Thresholds

The fourth edition of the programme that each year invites established designers to interpret the MAXXI Collection.

For 2021, the Chinese architecture studio Neri & Hu has been asked to interpret the work of an architect included in the MAXXI Architettura Collection.

Building a cultural bridge between West and East, past and present, the work of Carlo Scarpa, a master of Italian architecture with a long history of admiration for the East, is interpreted by contemporary architects through the concept of “threshold”, present in both the Chinese ‘jian’ and the Japanese ‘ma’, which can be translated as ‘space’ and ‘pause’.

The proposed installation reinterprets this suspension in an architectural sense as a physical mediation between two contiguous spatial environments, distinct but not disjointed, according to an idea that recalls the relationship between interiority and exteriority, public and private space.