Taking Care. Designing for the common good

TAKING CARE is the keynote that TAMassociati (Massimo Lepore, Raul Pantaleo, Simone Sfriso) – appointed by the Minister Dario Franceschini the curatorial team of the Italian Pavilion at the Biennale Architettura 2016 – has chosen in keeping with the theme of Reporting from the Front proposed by Alejandro Aravena to recount an architecture created with communities and capable of sharing needs and aspirations.
Taking Care is promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Art and Architecture and Suburbs (DGAAP), directed by Federica Galloni, Commissioner of the Italian Pavilion.
“Taking Care”, say the curators, “is an action that arises in the Italian Pavilion at the Biennale Architettura 2016 and then takes root and spreads outside it to generate a new civic awareness”. It is a highly social vision of architecture, but also the root of its being. The theme is divided into three sections, ‘Thinking‘, ‘Meeting‘ and ‘Acting‘, resting on three specific issues involving the common good. It urges visitors to recognize it, when it is found around them, the institutions to promote it, even with limited resources, and designers to embody it in architecture.
‘Thinking‘ is a survey of the theme of the common good, its value and the relations it forms with the built space: an approach enriched by the contributions made by people from different cultural and professional backgrounds, who look beyond the current definitions.
‘Meeting‘ is an exhibition of 20 architectural projects, all produced by as many design offices in Italy and abroad. Taken together, they recount how subjects, when they become co-authors, can create spaces and places useful to the community, so devoting equal importance both to the processes and the built work. This section identifies 10 areas of investigation – legality, health, living, environment, education, culture, play, science, nutrition and work – accompanied by a gallery of photographs that give visible form to the idea of the common good in Italy.
‘Acting‘, the culmination of the exhibition, is embodied in a concrete call to action. ‘Acting’ presents 5 displays of the mobile devices designed for direct intervention in marginal areas of Italy. They are mobile units mounted on trailers, designed by 5 Italian firms in collaboration with 5 associations long engaged in seeking to curb social and environmental degradation: AIB(Italian Library Association), Emergency, Legambiente, Libera, UISP (Italian Union for Sport for All).
With private sponsors and a civic crowdfunding campaign (Taking Care – outer cities in action, the first in Italy dedicated to the outer suburbs: www.periferieinazione.it), the devices will be built and take to the roads to become concrete instruments of preservation and social redemption.
The exhibit design and the catalogue of the Pavilion are notable for the Pop language of an original graphic novel and prominent illustrations, as well as the low-cost policies adopted and the recycling of the materials (including the reuse of wood from the Irish pavilion at Expo 2015) indoors and in the grounds of the Tese delle Vergini.

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