Loose Ends

“Loose Ends” is the first exhibition of Maria Giuseppina Grasso Cannizzo in Austria. She is one of the most interesting personalities in contemporary architecture but has still remained an insider tip despite having received numerous awards. The reasons for this may be found in her unpretentious manner or in the fact that the majority of her buildings are in Sicily. There, she has realised various revitalisations and transformations of historic buildings, detached houses and apartment buildings, as well as public projects such as the control tower for the port of Marina la Ragusa. Minimal, self-confident and at times, radical ideas, that are always open to the changes that life and time entail.

An important aspect of Maria Giuseppina Grasso Cannizzo's work is that she does not claim to create absoluteness or eternity in her buildings. Rather, she accepts the transformation of her buildings in daily use. She does not see herself as the dominant author who wants to mark a building as her own, but rather as the director, who is indeed pedantic and controlling during the planning and building process but who withdraws entirely once the building has been completed and handed over to those that will use and gradually take possession of it.

The central questions at the start of her planning process are never concerned with formal aspects but rather with analysing general conditions, context and the project's specific “stories”: the location, the building type, the wishes and ideas of the constructors. These requirements trigger a reasoning process in MGGC's mind that – in a state of tension between strategic approach and imaginative ideas – leads to particular and radical architectural solutions, which are however always determined by a very sensitive approach to space, material and light: For example, an almost minimalist sculpture seated in a landscape as a powerful sign (PRM2), a detached house transformed more by subtraction than by addition (SPR), a tower-like spatial continuum with suspended platforms and beds that appear to be levitating (GNS) or an elevated house with a wooden box moveable on rails in an archaic landscape (FCN).

With “Loose Ends” Maria Giuseppina Grasso Cannizzo has produced an exhibition that is a radical intervention and complex transformation of the aut's spaces and brings to light her attitude to architecture. Inspired by Sicilian industrial landscapes with oil tanks, drilling rigs and hauling plants and taking into account the spatial characteristics of the aut, she develops a unique universe within which the visitors senses are addressed directly by hearing, smelling and seeing. Simultaneously the exhibition offers insights into the design process of this unique Sicilian architect's work – reaching from her source of inspiration over design methods to the finished projects, which are presented by means of large-scale photographs by Hélène Binet as well as photo books and a film by Armin Linke.