A vast tree with drawings for leaves, a pond from which sprout images of projects, a major installation that recreates the mental landscape of Alberto Campo Baeza: that is Campo Baeza. The tree of creation is the third of the monographic Nature exhibitions, a cycle of four monographic installations through which MAXXI Architettura explores as many interpretations of contemporary architectural research.
Co-produced by MAXXI Architettura and Spanish Cultural Action (AC/E) with a particular contribution by Tokyo's Toto Gallery MA, the show, dedicated to the work of one of the leading figures of Spanish architecture, has been curated and designed by Manuel Blanco.
Alberto Campo Baeza believes in architecture as a constructed idea, believes that its main components are the gravity built up by space and the light built up by time.
He is one of Spain's purest and most radical architects, capable of constructing the space within his works using natural light, which at the same time constantly changes them. His method of construction places man at the centre of the natural world, providing him with a refuge and a lookout, a perspective on the surrounding landscape. These are constructions of great intensity, purely essential, with nothing superfluous and nothing missing, which allow time to stretch.
In the words of Margherita Guccione, the director of MAXXI Architettura, “the third installation in the Nature cycle offers a variation on the theme, with the curator responsible for contextualising the work of Alberto Campo Baeza. The metaphor of the tree and the artist's words reveal to us the harmony between the natural landscape and the architectural construction, where the Spanish architect's projects dematerialize, fluctuate, overcome gravity and make contact with the inherent rhythms of nature".
The exhibition, which covers 20 years of Campo Baeza's output (from 1988's Casa Turégano to projects dating from 2011), adopts the large tree as its central structure, analysing the great architect's creative process and revealing his most intimate dimension and his idiom.
As with all the projects selected for Nature, the Alberto Campo Baeza exhibition also reflects with a sense of poetic narrative on the natural tendency for mankind to contemplate a "recreated" natural world.
The Nature concept was created by Pippo Ciorra, MAXXI Architettura's senior curator, with the aim of forging a dialogue between the museum and a number of the most intriguing figures in Italian and foreign contemporary architecture. An exhibition "in quadruple time" that confronts architects with the same issue and presents them with the museum space. In the individual installations the architects and, in this particular case, the curator, build up a specific space capable of representing the meaning of and relationship with the theme of Nature, by exhibiting one or more projects dealing with this subject.
