About: Talks / Reframing Culture

The Fondazione Querini Stampalia, one of Italy’s most prestigious cultural institutions and a model of openness between historical heritage, innovation, and contemporary practice, and ABOUT: — Hearst Italia’s new editorial platform dedicated to fostering debate on the role of architecture in the contemporary world — are launching an important collaboration centered on the relationship between architecture and cultural institutions. The initiative explores how architecture can contribute to the regeneration of cultural spaces today. An architecture that does not merely build, but generates meaning, participation, and new forms of coexistence.

In November 2025, ABOUT: TALKS | Reframing Culture will launch, a series of conversations promoted by ABOUT: in collaboration with Fondazione Querini Stampalia. The program aims to create a critical space for reflection on the present and future of cultural institutions, starting from an essential question: how can architecture contribute to redefining the role of museums, foundations, libraries, and exhibition spaces today?

Venice, long a driving force in international architectural culture — home to the Architecture Biennale, the world’s leading event dedicated to architecture, and to IUAV University, one of Europe’s most authoritative schools of architecture and design — provides the ideal setting for a program of conversations featuring internationally renowned architects and experts capable of moving beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries.
Only a few months after its launch, ABOUT: continues its mission to highlight architecture not only as a design discipline, but as a cultural force capable of shaping ways of living, influencing social development, and impacting the future of communities.

At a time when museums, foundations, and exhibition spaces are undergoing profound transformations — from evolving management models and new modes of engagement to digital challenges — Reframing Culture proposes a multifaceted reflection on how architecture can contribute to the regeneration of these places, making them more accessible, inclusive, and vibrant. Through the contributions of leading international figures, the series seeks to restore architecture’s central role as a cultural, social, and political instrument. Not merely form, but content; not merely construction, but an infrastructure of thought.
Alessandro Valenti, Editor in Chief of ABOUT:

“Reframing Culture considers architecture a cosmopolitan practice that intertwines different worlds: an infrastructure of the sensible that does not simply design spaces, but operates within complex systems of relationships. Designing means recognising the invisible economies that sustain everyday life and making them the very substance of the project, restoring dignity to the margins. It means questioning the urban geographies of power and the asymmetries that regulate flows and movement. Architecture organises the way we inhabit the world not only through formal impositions, but also through alliances and negotiations: with the forces that traverse a territory and with the material, social, and technological conditions that determine its liveability. It is a practice that engages, convenes, and transforms. The architecture that interests me is capable of building a shared ecosystem of responsibility, equity, and care.”
Cristiana Collu, Director of Fondazione Querini Stampalia

The project will unfold through six public events. Each appointment will address a different scale of design — from exhibition design to architecture, from temporary installations to urban transformation — with a common goal: to rethink the relationship between space and culture in contemporary society by building a platform for dialogue between the worlds of design and institutions, between theory and practice, and between architecture and citizenship.
Admission is free upon registration.

All events will be recorded and subsequently made available online through the ABOUT: platform, creating a digital archive of content accessible to all.

Programme

20 November 2025
Beatrice Leanza | Mapping a New Cultural Landscape
The New Design Museum (Park Books)
A cultural strategist, museum director, and critic with a background in East Asian Studies, Beatrice Leanza has served as Director of MAAT in Lisbon and MUDAC in Lausanne, Creative Director of Beijing Design Week, and co-founder of The Global School, the first independent institute for design and creative research in China.
Drawing on her new book, The New Design Museum, Leanza reflects on the future of cultural institutions, proposing an understanding of the museum as an active and relational platform capable of overcoming the dichotomy between preservation and innovation while opening new spaces for participation and meaning-making.

28 January 2026
Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli | Performative Architecture
La libreria delle api (MUCIV, Rome, in collaboration with NERO Editions)
Founder of 2050+ and former partner at OMA, Pestellini Laparelli works at the intersection of visual culture, technology, and politics. His projects for cultural institutions are lightweight, mobile, and activatable. They propose a different way of inhabiting public and cultural space, one that engages with nature and civic participation.

16 February 2026
Formafantasma and Izaskun Chinchilla | Exhibitions as Research
This event will take the form of a conversation between Formafantasma and Izaskun Chinchilla, exploring exhibitions as tools for research and critical inquiry.
The Italian duo, composed of Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin, together with the Spanish architect — founder of her eponymous practice, Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, and professor at The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London — are redefining the role of exhibition design within cultural institutions.

9 April 2026
Raumlabor | Bottom-Up Institutions
Floating University, Berlin
For more than twenty years, the German collective has worked on themes of self-construction, pedagogy, and shared space. This conversation will explore architecture as educational infrastructure and a catalyst for civic engagement.

19 June 2026
OMA, David Gianotten | Cultural Buildings for Public Life
Egyptian Museum Turin, Taipei Performing Arts Center, WA Museum Boola Bardip, and White Cube LIRCAEI
Architect and Managing Partner at OMA, David Gianotten will explore how cultural institutions can become active landmarks in urban life and contribute to broader social and political debates.
Drawing on recent projects including the Egyptian Museum Turin, the Taipei Performing Arts Center, WA Museum Boola Bardip, and White Cube LIRCAEI in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Gianotten will discuss strategies for opening institutions to their surrounding contexts, creating new public spaces, and fostering civic engagement.