Open and Inclusive Museums

The Florentine practice Guicciardini e Magni specializes in the design of exhibition venues and events. It works all over the world with the same aim: turning common values into individual experience

OUTSTANDING AMONG THE RECENT WORKS OF THE FLORENTINE PARTNERSHIP Guicciardini e Magni, founded in 1990 and specialized in the design of exhibitions and museums, is the renovation of the 18thcentury complex of the Bottini dell’Olio in the district of Venezia Nuova in Livorno, turned into a cultural centre. In particular, the conversion of the church of the Luogo Pio into an exhibition venue, completed in 2018 with the aim using it to display collections of contemporary art, seems exemplary of the approach to design taken by the practice, which in the same year turned the former church of Sant’Agostino in Volterra into a diocesan museum. In the Luogo Pio Guicciardini and Magni also integrated the existing structure, designed by Giovanni del Fantasia, with a connection to the Bottini and completed the two by this time dilapidated ends of the ruined block of the Case Pie.

The balancing of the need to respect the past while making the most of the work on show and the capacity to approach what already exists with a contemporary language free of mimicry, but with a willingness to look for bespoke solutions, constitutes the distinctive mark of the studio, which in the last few years has won a series of important commissions through international competitions. Between 2020 and 2021 in fact the Gülhane Museum of Ottoman Arts in Istanbul’s Topkapi, the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo and the Bibliothèque Richelieu in Paris will all bear the signatures of Piero Guicciardini and Marco Magni. A remarkable ascent on the part of the practice, which started out in Tuscany with small ethnographic museums

before taking the step up in scale and reputation represented by the multi-award-winning Museo Galileo (2010) and Museo dell’Opera del Duomo (2015), both in Florence. “Museums are complex, individual systems. So our approach is based on specific situations, given that the absence of standardized responses is one of the most gratifying aspects of our work, offering us the possibility of learning something every time,” explains Marco Magni. “Equally important is the role of the people we work with: on the one hand the curators, with whom we have a constant relationship of dialogue and listening, and on the other the visitors, who long ago dropped their traditional acquiescent attitude towards the museum and feel free to choose directions, closer examinations and particular sections, as well as to ask for more and more space for social interaction (cafeterias, areas for relaxation and educational activities). It is only by responding to these requirements that the museum becomes a generous, open and inclusive facility, where it is not just art that is presented but common values are turned into individual experience.”

An approach that Guicciardini and Magni say they have learned from the museology of the English-speaking countries, less elitist than the Italian one of the great masters of museum design. Among their references, the architects cite the BBPR studio for its awareness of its role as an interpreter and not a protagonist with regard to the history and the cross-disciplinary nature of the arts, especially sculpture, photography and stage design. A stock of languages from which they draw “material and dimensional variations as well as multimedia installations based on the objects to be displayed, in such a way as to disrupt the repetitiveness of layouts thanks to episodes of great narrative power that are not self-referential.” ○