ROME.- In the Jubilee Year and on the occasion of the centenary of Luigi Pellegrin’s birth, MAXXI – the National Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome – turns its attention to one of Italy’s most visionary and unconventional architects. Opening on December 17, 2025, and on view through April 6, 2026, Prefigurations for Rome offers a focused yet revealing retrospective drawn from Pellegrin’s extensive archive, now preserved at MAXXI’s Architecture Archives Center and in private collections.
Rather than presenting a traditional chronological survey, the exhibition invites visitors into Pellegrin’s way of thinking. Curated by Sergio Bianchi and Angela Parente, the show unfolds along two intertwined paths: his professional architectural practice and a parallel, deeply imaginative body of artistic research. Large-scale drawings, models, and visionary studies reveal an architect constantly negotiating between what could be built and what could be imagined.
Pellegrin’s work was shaped by a desire to rethink how humans inhabit the planet. Beginning in the 1960s, he developed the idea of a “habitat system,” proposing elevated structures that would free the ground below, allowing the earth—and other species—to breathe. This radical ecological intuition, decades ahead of its time, runs through many of the works on view. His megastructures and suspended projects culminated in ambitious proposals such as the Equatorial Ring (1986), a conceptual work that reflects his belief in architecture as a planetary system rather than a collection of isolated buildings.
Rome occupies a central role in the exhibition. In the 1990s, the city became Pellegrin’s urban laboratory, as he imagined large-scale interventions for areas such as the Circus Maximus, the Appian Way, EUR, Ostiense, and the railway ring planned for the Jubilee of 2000. Although never realized, these projects proposed new infrastructural connections and spatial relationships that still feel strikingly relevant today, at a time when cities continue to grapple with mobility, density, and sustainability.
The exhibition also sheds light on Pellegrin’s built works, including post offices in Suzzara and Saronno and INA Casa housing projects in Ascoli Piceno, Galatina, and Gaeta, where architectural experimentation was paired with a strong social commitment. Together, these projects reflect an approach that refused to separate form from responsibility.
By bringing together decades of drawings, models, and speculative visions, Prefigurations for Rome offers more than a tribute. It presents Luigi Pellegrin as an architect whose ideas—once considered utopian—now resonate with renewed urgency, reminding us that the future of cities often begins in imagination.
