FOSBURY ARCHITECTURE



DOPO? / Via Carlo Boncompagni, 51/10, 20139 Milan MI


Fosbury Architecture is a collective founded in 2013 by Giacomo Ardesio, Alessandro Bonizzoni, Nicola Campri, Veronica Caprino, and Claudia Mainardi. ︎ FA is a spatial agency interpreting architecture as a tool that mediates between collective and individual needs; expectations and resources; sustainability and pragmatism; environment and human beings. ︎ FA is a research group aiming at expanding the boundaries of the discipline, redefining its role, and rethinking its production processes in the perspective of current challenges. ︎ FA is an architectural office delving into urban strategies, reuse of existing buildings, temporary installations, exhibition design, publishing projects, curatorial activities, and educational programs. ︎ FA, much like Dick Fosbury, constantly seeks new ways to overcome the limits imposed by the bar of convention.


CLIENTS / Besides private clients, Fosbury Architecture has worked for the following institutions: MIC, MIBACT,La Biennale di Venezia, Ecoc Matera 2019, MAGAZIN Exhibition Space for Contemporary Architecture in Vienna (AU), Comune di Milano, Triennale di Milano, Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, galleria Amy d Arte e Spazio a Milano, Manifesta (NL), Onassis Cultural Centre (GR) and Abe Bonnema Foundation (NL), Embassy of The Netherlands (IT); between the others FA collaborated with Flos, Ortigia Sound System, Quodlibet, BlaBla Car, Carhartt, Terraforma Festival, Vogue Photo Festival, Caparol e DAW Italia, Altofragile, L’Officiel Italia and Domus.

2023 | Spaziale | Venice, IT

Location: Venice, ITA
Event: 18. Mostra Internazionale di Architettura – La Biennale di Venezia
Program: Italian Pavilion curatorship
Period:
20 May – 26 November 2023
Promoter: DGCC - Ministry of Culture
Sponsors: Banca Ifis, Bottega Veneta, Rilegno, Fohhn, Epson, Flos, Fedrigoni, NM3
Collaborators: Lorenzo Cellini, Valeria Cesti
Invited practices: Post Disaster, BB, Giuditta Vendrame, HPO, Parasite 2.0, Lemonot, Studio Ossidiana, Orizzontale, (ab)Normal, Captcha Architecture
Visual Identity: Giga Design Studio
General Organisation and Institutional Relations: Chiara Bordin
Communication Strategy: P:S
Press Office: Lara Facco P&C
Photo © DSL Studio

Visit the website: Spaziale2023.it
Visit Instagram profile: Instagram.com

The new millennium, which began with the cultural crisis of the West triggered by September 11, 2001, has continued with the 2007-2008 economic crisis, the pandemic crisis of the past few years, the energy and geopolitical crisis of today, and the ecological crisis of tomorrow. The scarcity of resources in a context of permanent crisis is not only an opportunity but also the only direction in which it makes sense to practice. In our view, there is a generation that has already accepted the challenge and is trying every day to develop antibodies to disillusionment. Spaziale invites these practitioners to recognize themselves as a “movement” at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. The title refers to an expanded notion of the discipline that sees the built artifact not as an ultimate goal but as one of the possible tools for intervening in the fabric of relationships between people and places underlying every project. Nine practices were invited to collaborate with nine advisors – from other fields of creativity – in nine Italian territories representative of conditions of fragility or transformation, with the support of as many local interlocutors already involved in collaborative projects with these practices and advisors. Each intervention represents a chapter in an incomplete agenda of urgent research themes for the national context and for architecture: open questions, traceable to the scenario of transition – not only ecological – that we are facing in these years. Acknowledging that the role of curators includes a necessarily ethical dimension, we have decided to use this opportunity to trigger actions beyond the event's six-month duration. To extend the temporal horizon and convert resource consumption into an investment, the exhibition has been divided into three moments. The first was Spaziale presenta: the observatory that monitored the activation of the site-specific interventions. The second is Spaziale: Everyone belongs to everyone else: embodying, in the Tese delle Vergini, the formal and theoretical synthesis of processes triggered elsewhere. The third is Spaziale: an archive that will document local activities, the official public program at the Teatrino di Palazzo Grassi, and then become a permanent platform. In parallel with the program's expansion, the decision was made to undertake a contraction of the exhibition installation and a transfer of resources. For the first time, and thanks to the support of the General Directorate of Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture, the exhibition plays an active role in the production of pioneering projects, allowing us to say that, in Venice, the Italian Pavilion may be shrinking, but it is expanding throughout the country. The exhibition combines the nine projects in a unified narrative that compares images of local experiences, showcasing their places and actors, with the installations devised by the practitioners ideally arranged along a route that re-proposes a stylized outline of the Italian peninsula. We hope this collective and shared dimension of design will be the beginning of a widespread laboratory that endeavors to strengthen the sense of global community in which we find ourselves operating; aware that individual actions always involve social reactions – because we are all inextricably interconnected – and in the hope that the future will be a space in which Everyone belongs to everyone else.


2023 | Spaziale presenta | Venice, IT

Location: Venice, ITA
Event: 18. Mostra Internazionale di Architettura – La Biennale di Venezia
Program: Italian Pavilion curatorship
Period:
January – May 2023
Promoter: DGCC - Ministry of Culture
Sponsors: Banca Ifis, Bottega Veneta, Rilegno, Fohhn, Epson, Flos, Fedrigoni, NM3
Collaborators: Lorenzo Cellini, Valeria Cesti
Invited practices: Post Disaster, BB, Giuditta Vendrame, HPO, Parasite 2.0, Lemonot, Studio Ossidiana, Orizzontale, (ab)Normal, Captcha Architecture
Visual Identity: Giga Design Studio
General Organisation and Institutional Relations: Chiara Bordin
Communication Strategy: P:S
Press Office: Lara Facco P&C
Photo © DSL Studio

Visit the website: Spazialepresenta.it

Spaziale. Everyone Belongs to Everyone Else is the title of the Italian Pavilion at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, supported by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture and curated by Fosbury Architecture.
The project has been structured in two successive phases, the first setting up the second: Spaziale presenta, from January to April 2023, in the period leading up to the opening of the 2023 Architecture Biennale, will see the activating of nine site-specific interventions in as many selected locations throughout Italy. A website and Instagram account, launched in January 2023, chronicled the work in progress of Spaziale presenta and the activating of the nine interventions.


2023 | Spaziale publication | Venice, IT

Location: Venice, ITA
Event:
18. Mostra Internazionale di Architettura – La Biennale di Venezia
Program:
Publication
Insights:
Nina Bassoli, dpr-barcelona,Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, Markus Miessen, Anna Puigjaner Barberà, Mirko Zardini
Editorial Assistants:
Lorenzo Cellini, Valeria Cesti
Graphic Design:
Giga Design Studio con Alessandro De Vecchi, Riccardo Rudi, Mattia Salvà
Publisher:
Humboldt Books
Photo © Giacomo Bianco

Shop at: HumboldtBooks.com

The publication Spaziale. Ognuno appartiene a tutti gli altri collects the voices of all the protagonists involved in the Italian Pavilion at the 18th. International Architecture Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia. Nine practices of young architects, in collaboration with advisors from other fields of creative industries, were invited to develop pioneering actions in as many places in Italy. The outcomes, simultaneously presented in Venice and disseminated throughout the country, address an agenda of pressing issues for architecture: open questions about contemporaneity, ascribable to the transitional scenario - not only ecological - of our time; Within the volume, interviews among the working groups and curators delve into design approaches; photo essays guide the discovery of intervention sites; contributions from incubators reveal the aspirations and contingencies of local communities; in closing, four in-depth texts-edited by Mirko Zardini, Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, dpr-barcelona and Nina Bassoli-frame the Pavilion project within a broader disciplinary horizon.
The publication is made possible thanks to the support of the General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture and the 18. International Architecture Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia.


2023 | Come è bello far l’amore | Venice, IT

Location: Venice, ITA
Event:
18. Mostra Internazionale di Architettura – La Biennale di Venezia
Period:
20 May – 26 November 2023
Program:
visual display
Authors:
Alterazioni Video, Fantamagico, Fosbury Architecture
In collaboration with:
Diego Pascal Panarello
Producer:
Simona Ghinassi

Come è bello far l’amore da Trieste in giù is a generative video installation that captures and displays phrases, moments, and snapshots related to the experiences of the nine collaborative projects initiated by Spaziale. Everyone belongs to everyone else. In the preparatory segment of the exhibition,  Alterazioni Video visited the nine Stations, documenting each of the open work sites. Afterwards, with Fantamagico, the recordings were processed through a generative algorithm so that the glimpses and perspectives captured would echo each other, reconstructing a unified narrative. The voices of the interviewed designers become the thematic engine driving the appearance of the images in a continuous, nonlinear processing where places, authors, and communities merge to form a whole.


2023 | Borderlands | Milan, IT

Location: Milan, ITA
Event: Exhibition “ Costruire il futuro. Infrastrutture e benefici per persone e territori”
Program: Installation
Period:
3 – 26 march 2023
Collaborators: Lorenzo Cellini, Valeria Cesti
Photo © Gianluca Di Ioia

Like an operating system managing activities in the background, the spatial product of infrastructure has proliferated seamlessly on a global scale, becoming the most relevant form of urbanity of our time. Borderlands aesthetically examines the material imprint of the body of public works built by Webuild from 1920 to the present. To this end, photographs and film footage from the archives of the Italian multinational are rigorously compared with a series of snapshots taken from the Google Street View digital navigation service. Borderlands is the visual distillation of miles of black asphalt, turquoise mirrors of still water, familiar confetti of brightly colored boxes, dunes of fill sand and acres of green forest. A dense matrix of repeatable details and formula imprint themselves on our retina, leaving the afterimage of these nondescript places that oscillate between visibility and invisibility, identity and anonymity, strategic withdrawal and daring ambition.


2022 | KUBO | Ortigia, IT

Location: Siracusa, ITA
Event:
Ortigia Sound System
Period:
July 2022
Program:
dj booth
Photo © Bianca Burgo, Giacomo de Carro, Letizia Cigliutti @Stemattea

In the Syracusan countryside, in deliberate contrast with the venue, yet in dialogue with the sound system, arose an apparently monolithic and massive cube. Made of a lightweight, standardized steel structure: extremely economical, quick to assemble, and convenient to store, the DJ booth consisted of a kinetic box transforming during the event. A cage of light, completely covered in a reflective cloth during the night hours, progressively unveiled the stage from sunrise onwards. The project sought a synthesis between apparently opposed conditions, such as temporality and monumentality, simplicity and exuberance.


2022 | See the Stars Again | Milan, IT

Client: Flos
Location: Spazio Orobia, Milan, ITA
Event: Milan design Week
Period: May 2022
Program: set design
Photo © Luca Monaco

Within the framework of the MDW22, commissioned by Flos in their temporary premises in Spazio Orobia, the workshop involved the students of Domus Academy assembled spaces conceived for different contemporary attitudes related to dwelling. Starting from different furniture, including FLOS lamps, students proposed setups showcased afterward in the FLOS exhibition space.


2022 | Dropcity | Milan, IT

Location: Centre for Architecture and Design, Milan, ITA
Event: Milan Design Week
Period: May 2022
Program: set design
Client: Quodlibet

By creating a performative topography, the plateau intended to offer an unconventional consultation space for Quodlibet’s temporary shop. Playing with the module of a 50x25x20 cm perforated concrete block defined elements with their own character and variable heights serving as displays for books as well as seating for visitors.


2022 |  Characters | Wien, AT

Location: Magazin gallery, Wien, AUS
Period: April – May 2022
Program: curatorship and exhibition design
Supplier: Spazio Meta
Collaborators: Matteo Bassi, Lorenzo Cellini, Valeria Cesti
Photo © Simon Veres

Starting as research for alternative models of interiors that could serve as an antidote to the commodification of the domestic, “Environments of Resistance for Social Individuals” is an ongoing project began in 2017. It investigates those spaces, in-between architecture and furniture, designed to accommodate idiosyncratic characters. The installation is conceived as an interior in 1:1, composed of a series of volumes that interpret the most conventional domestic habits –such as sleeping, gathering, relaxing, etc.– These volumes serve as exhibiting support as well as a physical materialization of a peculiar way to perform the aforementioned actions. The space is devised as a mono-material interior clad in carpet, assumed as the epitome of comfort and domesticity. One unique immersive environment will enable a wide range of informal occupations in the exhibiting space. The exhibited pieces are a series of short films, each representing the story of a fictional character.


2021 | Urban Center | Prato, IT

Location: Prato, ITA
Client: Centro Pecci, Prato
Period: since 20th November 2021
Program: refurbishment and exhibition design
Photo © Margherita Villani and OKNO Studio

Strongly supported by the Comune di Prato and Fondazione per le Arti Contemporanee in Toscana, the Urban Center is a permanent laboratory, an observatory on urban transformations, a space for immersive installations, a theater, a playground to raise awareness of sustainability, a platform for multimedia content, a showcase for the city and much more: a living place for cultural debate with exhibitions but also events, conferences and webinars. For the opening, Fosbury Architecture curated the first temporary exhibition "Osservatorio Prato 2050" dedicated to the projects active in the city of Prato and to the local and international networks that each of them activates.


2021 | Possibility of an Island | Chianti, IT


Location: Castellina in Chianti, ITA
Event:
AA Visiting School 2021
Organizers:
Sofia Pia Belenki, Margherita Marri, Luigi Savio
Period: July 2021
Program:
education / workshop
Students:
Alessandro Celli, Martina Marchesi, Luca Monaco.

The Last Human on Earth is a short film that stages the final hours of the last of our species. Avoiding any apocalyptic visual temptation, the storyline dissects a relatively short timeframe in which the protagonist abandons civilisation and dives into a natural environment establishing a conflicting relationship with other species: a means to challenge anthropocentrism, to question the relationship between human and artificial intelligence, and to imagine which natural species could be next dominant on a global scale.


2021 | ADI Supersalone | Milan, IT

Location: Milan, ITA
Client:
ADI Design Museum
Event:
Milan Design Week 2021
Title main event:
Take your seat
Curatorship:
Nina Bassoli
Period:
May 2021
Program:
installation
In collaboration with:
(ab)Normal
Photo © Giovanni Emilio Galanello

In a pervasively commodified society, the boundary between public and private dissolves until it disintegrates. Environments of Resistance for Social Individuals is an incremental archive of authentically private spaces. While the home increasingly becomes a place of work and a means of subsistence, domesticity invades every field of human activity, with commercial
spaces that simulate living rooms, offices such as game rooms and restaurants such as kitchens. The sharing economy has converted intimacy into a commodity, forcing large sections of society to give up part of it, taking refuge in the little space left. The functional division of the house thus appears obsolete, unable to accommodate the fluidity of contemporary work. The Host Will Let You In Soon explores the use of the interior space, hosting new forms of contemporary work and entertainment.


2020 | Possibility of an Island | Chianti, IT

Location: Castellina in Chianti, ITA
Event:
AA Visiting School 2020
Organizers:
Sofia Pia Belenki, Margherita Marri, Luigi Savio
Period:
June – July 2020
Program:
education/workshop
Students:
Guglielmo Giomi, Lucile Una, Dario Argenti

Watch the video on: Youtube.com

The project On n’échappe pas à la machine examines the consequences of a tactical retreat from society as a medium to disentangle the impact of the societal changes imposed by the ongoing global pandemic in the aftermath of the lockdown imposed by the Italian state in the last three months. Reasoning on the possibility of a community freed by regulations and surveillance and inspired by the almost legendary experiences of self-proclaimed micronations, the project consists in a collaborative installation and performance that celebrates the act of appropriation of landscape as a foundation ritual.


2019 | Milano 2030 | Milan, IT

Location: Milan, ITA
Client: La Triennale and Comune di Milano
Program: curatorship
Art direction: Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli
Exhibition production: altofragile
Graphic design: mlxl studio
Architectural project: Matteo Ghidoni (salottobuono) and Enrico Dusi
Period: March-September 2019
Photo © Louis de Belle

The intention of the Urban Center was to host a series of public events organized by the City of Milan with a program dedicated to some of the key themes of city development envisioned in the Milan 2030 plan, such as urban forestation, rehabilitation of public housing stock, regeneration of squares and enhancement of neighborhoods. Also to promote research and study paths on the transformations of Milan and other cities in the world


2019 | Verde Prato | Prato, IT

Location: Prato, ITA
Client: Centro Pecci
Curators: Lisa Cristina Cattaneo, Emilia Giorgi
Period: March – April 2019
Program: set design
photo © OKNO studio

An experimental and innovative project, the result of intense team work by the Municipality of Prato's Planning Office which boasts of valuable contributions from international experts such as the architect Stefano Boeri and the scientist Stefano Mancuso, to mention just a few. The exhibition design presented heterogeneous materials such as drawings, maps, design documents, historical photos and video through a scaffolding system conceived as a scenic machine.


2018 | Incompiuto | Milan, IT

Co-editor: Alterazioni Video
Publisher: Humboldt Books
Graphic design: Julia
Program: publication
Year: 2018

INCOMPIUTO: The Birth of a Style is the first and only study – the result of ten years of fieldwork – of a phenomenon frequently discussed in our country and yet still not fully acknowledged: the nationwide presence of buildings and infrastructures of which the implementation has never been completed. The scope of this phenomenon, its spread across
the territory and its incredible architectural peculiarities together make the Incompiuto the most prominent Italian architectural style since WWII.


2017 | J’ai pris amour | Chicago, US

Location: Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, US
Event: Chicago Architecture Biennale – Make New History
Period: September 16, 2017 – January 7, 2018
Program: installation
Collaborators: Matteo Bassi , Matteo Frangi

J’ai pris amour was a project by Fosbury Architecture, the youngest group participating at “Make New History,” an exhibition curated by Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee for the second Chicago Architecture Biennale.
The installation investigated the disrupting effects of productive leisure on the space of the home. While domesticity permeates every human activity, work invades all the aspect of everyday life, blurring the boundaries between private and public. The figure of the video-blogger is probably the one that best embodies this brand new condition: the youtubers are immaterial workers making profits by broadcasting their personal life from the intimate space of the home. They represent the tangible transfiguration of the general intellect in the late capitalism of the XXI century. The wallpaper, cladding an entire room of the Chicago Cultural Center, is printed on 2 cm honeycomb cardboard and consists in seven perspective views combined in a unique drawing that refresh and manipulate the symbolic apparatus of the Studiolo. J’ai pris amour is the title of a famous renaissance song, whose score decorates the wooden inlays on the northern façade of the masterpiece in Urbino.


2016 | The Labyrinth | Villa Arconati, IT

Location: Villa Arconati, Milan, ITA
Event: Terraforma Festival
Video: Achille Mauri
Music: Andrea La Pietra
Supporter: Borotalco Italia
Year: 2016 – 2018

According to an operation of reclamation and redevelopment of the garden as an architectural park, as well as following the traces provided by the plan of Marc'Antonio Dal Re, it was decided to restore the labyrinth as it was and where it was. The maze, with a circular plan, has a diameter of 36 meters, a total of about 1000 square meters, and is organized on four axes and five concentric orders. Due to economic, logistical, and ecological necessities, the labyrinth was conceived as being built in 3 steps lasting one year. The compositional choice of the progresses aimed to achieve an accomplished and self-coherent architectural effect each year: the Hortus Conclusus (or walled garden), the enfilade, and the labyrinth.


2016 | M.U.R.O | Venice, IT

Location: La Biennale di Venezia 2016, Venice, ITA
Event: Up! Marghera on Stage, Padiglione Venezia
Year: 2016
Collaborators: Giacomo Nava

There are places that man has exploited to the point of rendering them inhospitable territories. Anecumenical places and peripheral spaces where the project is driven not by desire but by the absence of resistance and where the human presence is not only superfluous but alien. Porto Marghera is a space governed by machines whose ever-growing autonomy, combined with the gradual deterioration of the production plants, led to a progressive and irreversible depopulation of the area. Porto Marghera tells the story of all those landscapes that are sacrificed on the altar of progress because other landscapes can shine with their beauty and boast of their uncontaminated purity.


2015 | Europan 13 | Leeuwarden, NL

Location:  Leeuwarden, Netherlands, NL
Program: EUROPAN
Event: EUROPAN 13
Award: Competition 1st Prize
Year: 2015

Leeuwarden is a beautiful city which doesn’t need anything else than the definition of an approach able to combine the promotion of the city center and the involvement of the citizens into this process. Through a careful investigation of the current living condition, this project proposes a bottom-up strategy which, starting from the problems related to the depopulation process of the center, will be able to reactivate the urban core. Only reviving the center, the shops will have a market, the services will have users, the tourists a context to visit.


2014 | RROARK! | Milan, IT

Location: Milan, ITA
Program:
free-press fanzine
Period: October 2014 – April 2015

RROARK! has been an independent and free publication edited and produced by Fosbury Architecture, published by Mr Poli Kebab in 25000 paper copies. RROARK! investigated the contemporary condition of young workers in the field of architecture in order to encourage the debate around it.

Rroark! #01 - Bildungsroman
Rroark! #02 - Responsibilities
Rroark! #03 - Exaggerated Love
Rroark! #04 - Something
Rroark! #05 - The White Whale
Rroark! #06 - Idiosyncrasies
Rroark! #07 - Promise Land AD 2015

Period: June