Architects and engineers, when meeting is art

ROME - The modern art museum of Sao Paulo in Brazil, a 1960s masterpiece by the great Lina Bo Bardi, who conceived it as a monumental glass bridge suspended by two enormous pre-stressed concrete beams painted in red.

The pop colors and playful shapes that blend with the steel of the exposed structures in the revolutionary Beaubourg by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano in Paris, the iconic profile of the Sydney Opera House, with reinforced concrete that is modeled almost as light as the sails of boats blown up by the wind in the bay of the Australian capital.

Encyclopedic and spectacular, with photos, drawings and models of the most daring structures, full of suggestions, ideas, curiosities even for the visitor less familiar with the themes he tells about,

is indeed in the intent .

of the 21st century museum something more than an architectural review: "For us a manifesto exhibition", claims the president

"in full line with a spirit of the time that asks the arts, sciences and social sensibilities to collaborate . It is the approach of Ursula von der Leyen with the New European Bauhaus, it is the spirit that also feeds our project of the Grande Maxxi ".

 Curated by Maristella Casciato and Pippo Ciorra

, the path winds around two major strands: on the one hand, the great masterpieces born from the collaboration between structural engineers and architects, with about forty buildings designed from the post-war period to today and entered into history to begin with for example from

;

on the other, a focus on today's engineering, increasingly linked to digital with robotics and artificial intelligence, research on materials, new technologies.

    An evolution also told through the installations of seven university research centers around the world.

What comes out of it, Ciorra points out, "is therefore a dialogue between engineering traditionally understood and all contemporary forms of technological research and engineering applied in a thousand ways to the construction and management of space, which in any case is playing a role very important in architecture ".

To accompany the main path, there is also

I, one of the most brilliant structural engineers of the second half of the twentieth century, author of futuristic projects, from the one awarded in 1969 and never built for the Messina Strait Bridge, with the design of a single span 3 thousand meters long, at the Ponte sul Basento built between 1971 and 1976, where he was able to put into practice his theories on the structural minimum with a very happy outcome today.