MILAN.- The Collective exhibition, conceived by Platform and curated by Luca Molinari and Simona Finessi, involves 140 architecture studios from all over the world and is being exhibited at the Scuola Grande di Misericordia in Venice.

The New Together is the initiative that Platform is organising in Venice from 20 May to 30 July 2023, to coincide with the opening of the prestigious 18th Architecture Biennale, aiming to fuse together the characteristics that make Platform recognisable to an international audience: international cultural initiatives and networking.

The New Together is an exhibition curated by Luca Molinari (Editorial Director of Platform) with the collaboration of Simona Finessi and a young curatorial team, which aims to investigate, through the projects of 140 architecture firms from all over the world, how the design of the spaces we inhabit is evolving to meet the needs of the new times we are living in.

The Scuola Grande della Misericordia in Venice is the venue chosen by Platform to set the Exhibition and all the collateral events that will animate the exhibition period from 20 May to 30 July 2023. It is a monumental space designed by Sansovino and skilfully restored in 2015, where art, history and culture dialogue with the territory. Located in the Sestiere of Cannaregio, exactly between Ca' d'Oro and San Marcuola, it is an institutional destination chosen for prestigious exhibitions, installations and cultural events.

The architecture firms involved in The New Together will be called upon to tell their vision in first person during the PLATFORM ARCHITECTURE FESTIVAL, which will take place from 23 to 26 June 2023 at the Scuola Grande di Misericordia. The architects will animate four days of debate and confrontation with the aim of creating a real active platform in which to collect the visions, the points in common and also of contrast of a new way of being together, through architecture and the heterogeneous languages that the Exhibition identifies.

The exhibition project for the main exhibition was entrusted, as for the 2021 edition, to an architecture studio under 40, chosen following an invitation-only competition. The studio chosen by Platform is Superluna, founded in Como in 2017 by Luca Sartori and Marco Bonfatti Paini. Superluna has interpreted the design scheme of The New Together by imagining to visualise the 140 projects in 14 structures that recall buoys as tools to direct and illuminate the contemporary world. Luca Sartori, describes the exhibition concept with a metaphor: "We sail in a stormy sea, all together, all in the same big boat. Fragility accompanies us in an age full of uncertainties, but we move forward looking towards the future, in the awareness that architecture can still be one of those tools to save us, among the high waves of this contemporaneity."

The 14 buoy structures collect and house the exhibition panels, creating thematic islands. Luca Molinari imagined that each buoy would group 10 projects according to a keyword linked to the theme The New Together. "Each buoy focuses on an action, a desire for a newfound sense of being together in all those places and for all those needs that shape the daily lives of each of us," explains the Curator. "In each family come together projects that differ in size, adaptation to the context, purpose, settlement principle, material quality. They are projects that hybridise and fluidify functional and typological hierarchies to rediscover the value of 'spaces of possibility' where many facts of life can happen. They are projects that suggest simple directions to be pursued in community: to care, to move in the landscape gently, to meet, to transform with use what has been used in the same way, and then, to regenerate, to look around, to live and work openly to mix the moments of life in generous architectures-spaces that welcome the life that awaits us".

Platform Network
The New Together
May 20th, 2023 - July 30th, 2023