Main Architecture and Design Museo Novecento – Immersive Museum

Museo Novecento – Immersive Museum

The new Museo Novecento, which recently opened in Florence, Italy and is dedicated to Italian art of the twentieth century, is housed in the old Hospital of San Paolo in Piazza Santa Maria Novella. The project by Avatar Architettura defines the museum setting as a suspended space. Visitors come upon it through lively devices of spatial mediation which, placed at the start of the exhibition path, on the first floor of the cloister, introduce them to contemporary experiences and artistic research.

Completed after almost half a century of proposals and projects and opened last summer, the Museo Novecento exhibits a part of the Municipal collections together with artworks and documents relating to recent decades, loaned by artists, collectors and organizations that have generously supported the creation of this new institution. The rooms dedicated to the municipal collections display, on a rotating basis, the numerous donations from artists and collectors received thanks to an appeal made by the critic Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti after the flood of 1966, including the prestigious Alberto Della Ragione collection.

From De Chirico to Morandi, Emilio Vedova to Renato Guttuso, up to the Florentine section at the Venice Biennale, the Museo Novecento embodies two museums in one: a civic museum, through a narrative that links the public collections of the 20th century to the history of the city, and an “immersive” museum, integrating the town’s heritage with testimonies of the national and international artistic events that marked the territory from the second half of the Sixties.

Developed in a very short time and produced with limited economic resources, the project by Avatar Architettura (Nicola Santini and Pier Paolo Taddei) interprets a complex system of requirements with originality and confidence.

Starting with the physical location of the museum and its identity, the museographical project was defined by the scientific curator Valentina Gensini who encouraged the search for “a new concept of museum. An immersive museum that offers a unique experience personalized for visitors: artworks, installations, sound devices and multimedia equipment construct the narrative of the Twentieth Century in a backwards journey from the Nineties to the avant-garde of the beginning of the century.”

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