Catalogue of the exhibition Technoscape. The Architecture of Engineers, curated by Pippo Ciorra and Maristella Casciato, hosted by MAXXI from October 2022 to April 2023, and focusing on the relationship between structural engineering, whether vernacular or avant-garde, and the invasion of technology into our operating and living spaces.

The volume reflects the exhibition’s double register, which, questioning the role that architecture can play in the near future, is arranged in two sections corresponding with the two great universes of technological innovation and construction engineering. Through numerous contributions resulting from the collaboration with universities and research centres, the book retraces and examines the many occasions in which architecture, engineering and science overlapped during the twentieth century: first in the heroic and then more mature phase of the diffusion of reinforced concrete, then with the affirmation of hi-tech construction methods in the 1970s and 1980s and lately with the irruption of contemporary digitally controlled technologies.

The publication is enriched by an extensive photographic apparatus through which the symbolic buildings of the great structural engineers from the post-war period to the present day can be fully appreciated.

Pippo Ciorra is Professor of Design at the School of Architecture in Ascoli Piceno. He is coordinator of the international research doctorate “VDH” and member of CICA. He has been working with several magazines, newspapers and for the National radio since 1981. He has published essays, research papers and monographic studies. Since May 2010 he is Senior Curator at MAXXI Architettura in Rome.

Maristella Casciato is Associate Professor of History of Architecture at the Aldo Rossi Faculty of Architecture, University of Bologna. Member of the ICOMOS 20th Century Heritage Internation Scientific Committee. Curator of the “Architecture | Exhibitions and Archives” section at MAXXI in Rome, she has also been appointed Senior Curator of Architectural Collections at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.