23.3.14

Trop urbain ? Too urban ?

Oscar Gential is curator of the exhibition Trop urbain ?, featuring the researches and works of TRIBU architecture, at the i2a istituo internazionale di architettura.

until April 30, 2014
Trop urbain ? (too urban ?)
TRIBU architecture
i2a istituo internazionale di architettura
Portich da Sura 18, Vico Morcote
Switzerland

See the presentation of the exhibition on i2a, TRIBU, World Architects and Domus websites.


Too urban?

From the start, TRIBU architecture have been fascinated by the urban topic. The city, and everything it generates, has thus become their field of research as week as their favorite testing ground.

This permanent obsession also transpires in their approach to architecture, in their dedication, their actions, their communication and their position.

The city is first of fall a place of crossing, exchange, encounter - of togetherness; but it also sometimes become the place of distance, divergence, separation. It is the place of desires and illusions, of the most beautiful dreams as well as the loudest cries; its own essence agglomerates all the excesses.
And what if it was thanks to the definition of these excesses, i.e. of what is too urban, that we were able to re-establish the primary qualities of the city, those of togetherness?

Put forward as a provocative advertising slogan, the term too urban (trop urbain) becomes for this exhibition an emblem as well as a subject of scrutiny.

At the meeting point of paradoxes, too urban feeds on images, icons and symbols, opposite or contradictory, collected here on the table in the middle of the room, the locus of the debate.

"Too urban?" does not intend to give a single answer or suggest a single way of conceiving a city and togetherness. The ambition of the exhibition is to turn it into a subject of collective research, a common interrogation.
The true essence of too urban is to constantly evolve, like this exhibition, that must be continuously completed and by those who are urban and too urban.