Performing Architecture

Performing Architecture is a citywide festival launched in Milan through the collaboration between BASE and DOPO?, which engaged five districts in the southern suburbs—Corvetto, Chiaravalle, Stadera, Barona and Tortona—weaving a symbolic route among cultural centres.

Its goal was to create a laboratory of experimentation capable of generating exercises in collective thinking and fostering dialogue and active participation within local communities. Comprising three essays (by Linda Di Pietro, Salvatore Peluso and Alessandro Pasero) and five conversations with the participating authors, the publication does not celebrate the festival experience but seeks to reinterpret it critically. Rather than attempting to theoretically redefine the boundaries and possibilities of the architectural discipline, the project by BASE and DOPO? stems from a pure desire for experimentation.

This publication goes beyond theoretical speculation, looking at practices from within with the aim of analysing them, bringing new themes to light, and generating repeatable and verifiable protocols.