The event is promoted and sponsored by:
ICFA Italian Cultural Foundation of America
and
the AIA New York Chapter's
Architecture Dialogue Committee

Riani uncharted territories
Independent and solitary with a tendency toward idealism. Inclined to explore surprising and risky roads of knowledge through the places of the mind and the heart, without sacrificing the passion, awe and tension of the journey’s start.
His experience as an architect is animated and underpinned by an investigation into the profound sense of life, beyond the borders of the customary. The answers he finds to his search for meaning give body, form and atmosphere to spaces designed for people to live in harmony with themselves and with others. To know, discover and create—the key words of the philosopher, poet and artist—are inseparable from the existential and professional dimension of Paolo Riani.
Paolo Riani lives life and architecture as “a kind of challenge, a constant risk for the creative intelligence.” He experiences it with that passion and risk through his various fields of activity in different parts of the world—Japan, the United States, the Middle East, Russia, and Italy—where his untiring research has taken him from 1960 to today.
The book “Riani uncharted territories,” the first to cover the full itinerary of his life—aims to illuminate Paolo Riani as a three-dimensional figure.

The key moments and transitions in his life are divided into nine chronological periods:
1. Patient investigation (1960-1965)
2. Japan and beyond (1966-1970)
3. The challenge of Utopia: USA, Lebanon, Moscow (1971-1975)
4. Experimentation and Sacrifice: Italy and Arab countries (1976-1987)
5. Experimentation and Risk: USA, Italy, Japan (1988-1994)
6. Explorations: the political arena (1994-1997)
7. Disenchantment and recovery (1998-2000)
8. Explorations: The Italian Cultural Institute in New York (2000- 2003)
9. Interpreting the Present/Building the Future: Italy and Moscow (2003-2006)

The full itinerary, documented by original architectural materials, knowing photographs as visual dialogues with the environment, persons, and landscapes; by enchanted travel notes and disenchanted important encounters—allows the unique profile of an explorer of uncharted territories to emerge, born up by a deep attachment to life and guided by strong ethical convictions.

While he was still a student Riani wrote, “The secret to living every day rather than merely surviving is adjusting rather than adapting, breathing rather than sighing, being violently tranquil and scandalously good.” He already realized that “It’s not easy, especially when you’re alone, especially in this country (Italy), where people too often confuse loyalty with cunning, sincerity with impudence, modesty with priggishness.” For him, “the work of an architect is a conscious contribution to renewing the meaning of things,” since “designing buildings means trying to discover unclear meanings of life in events that change meanings.”
For Riani, making architecture is thus a natural calling, the métier that he realized, precociously, was the most congenial way for him to express his dreams, passions and ideas in material and public form. Verifying the quality of the product means measuring whether it meets his convictions, which he has parsed courageously—at times through stubborn sacrifices and undeniable mistakes—in the often insidious game of living in the limelight. In other words, this is a book that, because of its criteria and materials, can offer everyone, and not just the so-called specialists in the field—food for thought on the ethical and civil values connected to culture and the models for conceiving and making architecture.
Images and words from Riani’s life and professional practice mirror each other playfully, while offering to the gaze, the mind and the imagination:
Projects: the architect’s studio with sketches, drawings, illustrations and models as material signs of a thinking and acting “at the ethical before the aesthetic level,” for an architecture that is “counter-form” to changing life;
Visions: of human geography, urban spaces, life fragments, suggested by notes and images that evoke exploration, fleeting visits, lasting stays;
Encounters: with masters and protagonists of the architectural adventure of the late twentieth century, captured humanely while they risk their professional and at times private activity.
Organized by Rita Scrimieri, the book is a second edition with English text, (the first Italian edition, March 2005, is sold out) and contains countless projects and designs, a rich repertory of travel photographs, notes and testimonies by Antonio Paolucci, Shigekatsu Nakamura, Francesco Guerrieri, Giuliano Maggiora, Mildred F. Schmertz, Melissa Harris, Ron Herron, Fosco Maraini, and photographs by Paolo Riani, Aldo Ballo and Toshiaki Kitai. The graphics are by Andrea Lancellotti.

Riani uncharted territories - ICFA Editions, 2006, 208 pages, $100.

Notes on Paolo Riani
Paolo Riani is an architect and urban planner of award-winning projects worldwide spanning a professional career of almost 40 years.
He began the formative years of his practice in Tokyo in the office of Kenzo Tange, together with Arata Isozaki and Kisho Kurokawa, and worked on the Kyoto master plan. During his six years in Japan, he traveled extensively in the Far East sending articles and photographic reports to various magazines, and was made a member of the International House of Japan, the Shinseisaku Academy and the Nihon Kenchiku Shikai.
With a libera docenza (Italian Ph. D.) in architecture from the University of Florence he left for New York City with a Fulbright Grant in 1971 where he taught architecture at Columbia University worked as an architect and consultant to large real-estate firms. He worked in the Middle East before returning to Italy and establishing a practice in Florence.
In 1994 he turned his attention to the political scene in Italy, where he was elected Senator of the Republic in his native constituency of Lucca in Tuscany. From 2000 to 2003, Mr. Riani served as Director of the Italian Cultural Institute on Park Avenue, an appointment by the Foreign Minister of Italy, faced with the task to represent Italy’s cultural heritage, both past and contemporary, to a New York City audience.
He returned to Italy in 2003 where he resumed his practice as architect. His most recent architectural and urban planning projects address the complexities of sustainable growth in Italy.

ICFA is grateful to FILIPPO BERIO, SALOV North America

VOYAGER explores the work of Italian artist Mariella Bettineschi over the last seven years, through a touring exhibition that involves seven site-specific installations in seven museum spaces in the United States, and ends in Italy at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Bergamo.

VOYAGER is, as the artist herself states, “an exploratory voyage inside and outside of ourselves, from Duchampian figures and sidereal spaces to astronauts and flying machines”.
Mariella Bettineschi uses new technology and new language to explore a new dimension: like in Duchamp’s Infra-mince, the ultimate thinness, Mariella Bettineschi carries us along in the spaces between things, from the second to fourth dimensions and, here, beyond.
VOYAGER was launched in March in New York City, at Dorfman Projects in Chelsea www.dorfmanprojects.com/DP-exhibitions.html
and at the Casa Italiana at NYU. www.nyu.edu/pages/casaitaliana
The next showing was in Philadelphia at the University of Arts, Rosenwald - Wolf Gallery
www.dorfmanprojects.com/DP-exhibitions.html
and now Mariella’s installations will appear in the West Coast venues lasting through the summer, as well as in the Museum of New Art in Detroit www.detroitmona.com/Museum_of_New_Art_1.htm

VOYAGER is an alchemic journey through the use of virtual images, which are manipulated and morphed to infinity and explored in terms of their mutating potential.
VOYAGER has a 136-page catalogue in Italian and English, compiled by Mariella Bettineschi as an “artist’s book”. It features a collection of essays by curators, photographs of the entire project and the bibliographic apparatus. It is published by Michele Lombardelli in 3000 copies.
VOYAGER is sponsored by S. PELLEGRINO, RADICIGROUP, BPU, and SERARGENTINA.

Tour schedule: (please click on the links for details)

SANTA MONICA
Santa Monica Museum of Art
www.smmoa.org/
Bergamot Station G1, 2525 Michigan Avenue
May 12 - August 19

LOS ANGELES
Italian Cultural Institute
www.iiclosangeles.esteri.it/IIC_Losangeles
1023 Hilgard Avenue
May 15 – August 30, 2006

DETROIT
Museum of New Art
www.detroitmona.com/Museum_of_New_Art_1.htm
7 North Saginaw Street, Pontiac
May 20- June 30, 2006

CHICAGO
Jean Albano Gallery
www.jeanalbano-artgallery.com/index.html
215 West Superior Street
June 2 – July 8, 2006

BERGAMO
Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea
www.gamec.it/
Via S. Tomaso 53
September 21 – Novembre 5, 2006

FIRENZE
Biagiotti Progetto Arte
www.artbiagiotti.com/
Via delle Belle Donne 39r
November 10 – December 23, 2006

wall/event An interactive installation by Ronit Dovrat, artist from Israel who now resides in Massa. Ronit’s wall is placed in the city center in a place where many people pass each day. A concrete wall of large dimensions, to invade normal everyday life where people take so much for granted their freedom of movements and relations with others. To provoke sensations emotions reactions questions reflections actions: this is not only a wish for Ronit, but a necessity and urgency, which can no longer be postponed.
In conjunction with the separating wall an exhibit of 11 projects by students of architecture under Arch. Paolo Riani at the University of Pisa to conclude the exhibit uncharted territories Paolo Riani per territori sconosciuti

From the laboratory of Ronit Dovrat, artist from Israel
Kilometres of reinforced concrete 8 meters tall, barbed wire along the entire length, hundreds of bulldozers, soldiers, tanks, check points.
This is the Palestinian landscape that has been designed and built by the Israeli government. A landscape of separation and destruction, humiliation and discrimination, suffering and death.
Death is the immediate significance of this landscape. Death of the environment, of nature, of human beings. Death in the present. Death of the future.
This is how life is closed within the wall beyond which, if only for a short while longer, you can look up and see the sky.
My eyes look for the hills, the villages, the cultivated fields, the olive groves, the women and the men, the old people sitting, watching their fields. I look for the children, their voices.
I’m Israeli. It’s not true that history teaches us. We’ve learned nothing. Memory is short. The happiness after the Berlin wall fell, not so many years ago, does not keep us from building new walls today.
[We can always give motivations, we can explain the difference between one wall and another, but the fact is they are building another wall and this wall is the symbol of a will to transform life into hell…]
My body, my heart, my soul are all surrounded by a wall.
I’m Israeli. My life cannot be happy or peaceful as long as it is not happy and peaceful for those who live on the other side of that wall.
What kind of life do Palestinian children have, or will they have? How will Israeli children grow up knowing their parents are building a wall for their future?
As long as Palestinian children suffer, no wall can secure the lives of Israeli children. No wall can hide the truth.
I feel the need to cry. A very loud cry to awaken those who allow this wall to be built. From my suffering, shared with many other Israeli people, a need arises to create something that will manifest my cries in order to reach the people who are distracted, deaf, indifferent.
Something that will bring the wall to places where the peaceful everyday life is physically and mentally distant from the land and drama of the Palestinian people.
I ask myself: what happens when you find yourself physically in front of a wall, a real wall, not one that is seen distractedly on TV or else just imagined?
And how do you feel when you find yourself all of a sudden in front of a wall, huge and insurmountable, that obstructs your view, blocks your path, separates you and prevents any contact with the world that lives beyond that wall? With another on the opposite side who at the same time has the same experience?

From these considerations and questions came the idea to do a wall/event
A concrete wall of large dimensions, to invade normal everyday life where people take so much for granted their freedom of movements and relations with others. To provoke sensations emotions reactions questions reflections actions.

opening Saturday November 5 , 6pm

After its first showing in Florence at the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno (April 2005) followed by Peccioli (Pisa) and Montecatini Terme, “uncharted territories – Paolo Riani” is now on view in Massa-Carrara.The exhibit is a biographical itinerary that illustrates for the first time the work and life of Paolo Riani, architect of international fame. The exhibit, organized by ICFA – Italian Cultural Foundation of America and promoted by the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno (Academy of Arts and Design) of Florence, will be on view from November 5 through December 4, 2005 in the Ducal Palace in Massa. Opening hours are 10am-1pm, 4-7pm, closed Mondays. Admission is free. Under the patronage of: City of Florence, University of Pisa, American Institute of Architects (AIA) New York Chapter, American Consulate of Florence, the Japan Foundation, the Municipality of Peccioli (Pisa) and the Province of Massa Carrara, l’exhibition recounts 40 years of Paolo Riani’s career.
The full itinerary, documented by original architectural materials, knowing photographs as visual dialogues with the environment, persons, landscapes, by enchanted travel notes and disenchanted important encounters - allows the unique profile of an explorer of uncharted territories to emerge, born up by a deep attachment to life and guided by strong ethical convictions.
For Riani, making architecture is thus a natural calling, the métier that he realized while still a young student was the most congenial way for him to express his dreams, passions and ideas in material and public form. “Had he lived in the Middle Ages” – writes Antonio Paolucci, former Cultural Minister of Italy, – Paolo Riani would have been a maestro comacino. They were a guild of wandering architects equipped with specialized knowledge and tools. Their name derived from Latin, “magistri cum machinis,” masters with machines, which in the vernacular became “maestri comacini.” They traveled throughout Europe, from Catalonia to Umbria, from Lombardy to Westphalia, to build churches and palaces, and to give measure and order to cities that had forgotten them completely. Paolo Riani would surely have been among their number.”
Images and words from Riani’s life and professional practice mirror each other playfully, proposing to the gaze, the mind and the imagination:
Projects: the architect’s studio with sketches, drawings, illustrations and models as material signs of a thinking and acting “at the ethical before the aesthetic level,” for an architecture that is “counter-form” to changing life;
Visions of human geography, urban spaces, life fragments, suggested by notes and images that evoke exploration, fleeting visits, lasting stays;
Encounters with masters and protagonists of the architectural adventure of the late twentieth century, captured humanely while they risk their professional and at times private activity.
On the occasion of the show, the ICFA presents a monographic volume on and by Paolo Riani with testimonials by Antonio Paolucci, Shigekatsu Nakamura, Ron Herron, Fosco Maraini, and photographs by Aldo Ballo and Toshiaki Kitai. The volume is curated by Rita Scrimieri, graphic design by Andrea Lancellotti.
(First Italian edition, 2005,172 p. € 80. Second edition with English text to be published in March 2006)

inaugurazione sabato 9 aprile, ore 18

orario:
feriale 10-13/16-19
festivo 10-13
lunedì chiuso, ingresso libero

Sulla figura a tutto tondo di Paolo Riani centra l’obbiettivo la mostra uncharted territories Paolo Riani per territori sconosciuti, che apre il 9 aprile a Firenze nella Sala delle Esposizioni dell’Accademia delle Arti del Disegno.
L’intero percorso - documentato da materiali architettonici originali, da sapienti fotografie come dialoghi visivi con ambienti, persone, paesaggi, da incantate note di viaggio e disincantati incontri - ripercorre per la prima volta la sua intera vicenda biografica e lascia emergere il profilo singolare di un esploratore di territori sconosciuti, sorretto da una profonda adesione alla vita e guidato da convinzioni etiche forti e imprescindibili.
“Fosse vissuto nel Medioevo – scrive Antonio Paolucci – Paolo Riani sarebbe stato un maestro comacino. Sarebbe appartenuto cioè a quella corporazione di architetti girovaghi muniti di saperi e di strumenti speciali (per questo si chiamavano magistri cum machinis o
maestri comacini in volgare) che giravano l’Europa dalla Catalogna all’Umbria, dalla Lombardia alla Renania, per costruire chiese e palazzi, per dare misura e ordine a città che misura e ordine avevano dimenticato”.
Immagini e parole della vita e della professione di Riani si susseguono così nella mostra, rispecchiandosi come in un gioco di riflessi trasversali, nel proporre allo sguardo, alla mente, all’immaginazione:
progetti, ossia il laboratorio dell’architetto con schizzi, disegni, illustrazioni, plastici, quali segni materiali di un pensare e un agire sul piano etico prima che estetico;
visioni di geografie umane, spazi urbani, frammenti di vita, suggerite da note e immagini evocanti esplorazioni, impermanenti dimore, duraturi soggiorni;
incontri con maestri e protagonisti della vicenda architettonica del secondo Novecento umanamente colti nel loro agire professionale e, talora, privato.
La mostra consiste di 20 pannelli (100x150 cm) e presenta, oltre a numerosi progetti e disegni, un ricco repertorio fotografico, appunti e testimonianze di viaggi; documentazione a stampa; 30 modelli; una proiezione multimediale.
Curata da Andrea Lancellotti e Rita Scrimieri, la mostra è organizzata dalla ICFA - Fondazione per la Cultura Italiana-Onlus e promossa dall’Accademia delle Arti del Disegno di Firenze.
Avrà carattere itinerante, in Italia e all'estero. Sono confermate le date del 15 settembre a New York, (Center for Architecture-AIA) e dal 5 novembre 2005 a Massa (Palazzo Ducale.)
È patrocinata da: Città di Firenze, Università degli Studi di Pisa, American Institute of Architects (AIA) New York Chapter, Consolato Americano di Firenze, Istituto di Cultura Giapponese (Japan Foundation), Comune di Peccioli (Pisa), Provincia di Massa Carrara.
In occasione della mostra, l’ICFA presenterà un volume monografico dallo stesso titolo con scritti e fotografie di Paolo Riani, con testimonianze di Francesco Gurrieri, Melissa Harris, Ron Herron, Fosco Maraini, Antonio Paolucci, Mildred Schmertz. Il volume è curato da Rita Scrimieri e il progetto grafico è di Andrea Lancellotti.

ICFA, in collaboration with the Fondazione Carnevale and the Barnum Museum of Bridgeport, CT, proposes an entertaining perspective of Carnevale in Viareggio to an American audience.
The special exhibition will feature graphics and 3-D works created by the artists of cartapesta (paper machè) for the Carnevale parades of Viareggio, include photos and videos of the Carnevale parades and the cartapesta masters at work in their studios, and even a workshop for children to learn the art of cartapesta, all in an appropriately “carnevalesque” venue: the famous Barnum Museum of Bridgeport.

Wed. Feb. 2 – “Views from our bridge”
3pm – 7:30pm (w/coffee break)
Thurs. Feb.3 –- “Who’s afraid of the American Wolf?”
3pm – 7:30pm (w/coffee break)
Info: dir@teatrodipisa.pi.it

L’altramerica project is the result of a reflection on 3 plays included in the drama program of Teatro Verdi in Pisa for the season 2004-2005: Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, Paolo Poli’s comedy adapted from Thorton Wilder’s novel Bridge of San Luis Rey and Edward Albee’s Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? Two days of round table discussions with journalists, historians, scholars: experts of various fields who can share their professional experience in USA for an exchange of ideas.

“l’altramerica”

Ridotto del Teatro di Pisa – 2 - 3 febbraio 2005 - due pomeriggi di incontri
Mercoledì 2 febbraio – La voglia dell’America
0re 15- 19,30 (c/coffee break)
Giovedì 3 febbraio – La paura dell’America
0re 15- 19,30 (c/coffee break)
Info: dir@teatrodipisa.pi.it

Due tavole rotonde tra i relatori, dove si dà lo spazio di confronto agli intervenuti: personalità di grande esperienza e prestigio nel panorama culturale nazionale e internazionale, scelti tra giornalisti, storici degli Stati Uniti d’America, storici della letteratura americana, esperti in varie discipline che abbiano vissute parte della propria esperienza umana e professionale nel Nord America.