Massimo Scolari

The scholar, painter, and architect Massimo Scolari chose early in life not to build. His small-format drawings, often accompanied by theoretical writings, are not views of an architectural utopia or of a proposed reality; rather, each is intended as a redesign of an architectural form (a fortress, a bridge, a dwelling, a small city, a landscape), "extracting it from its obvious context, redescribing it as though it were being seen for the first time."
In the Passaggio Urbano Project, a remote landscape and an uninhabitable building seem caught in a moment of transformation and construction. An unoccupied cube contains a variety of the familiar architectural elements that would normally constitute a traditional house—masonry cladding, windows, gable roof, cantilevered slabs—yet their scrambled arrangement requires a different interpretation, although a nonspecific one. In his writing, in fact, Scolari has chosen to describe a house through negatives, a practice he finds revealing and liberating: "The house must not have ribbon windows, must not rest on piloti, must not have a flat roof, must not refer to the tradition of the Modern Movement, must not be solely a living space, must not extend more than two stories above ground, must not rest directly on the ground (must not, therefore, have a base), and must not be symmetrical with respect to its main axis." His one affirmation, meanwhile, reflects an aesthetic requirement in his work, borne out by the delicacy of his watercolor rendering: "Beautiful things are the only friends who never deceive you."