Italian
The Iuav University of Venice celebrates a century of excellence with an unmissable exhibition. “100 drawings for 100 years” offers a unique insight into the evolution of architecture and design through the eyes and hands of its protagonists. The exhibition will be open to the public from April 16 to July 31, 2026
VENICE. The Iuav University of Venice is preparing to celebrate its centenary with a significant exhibition event: the show “100 drawings for 100 years.” The initiative, promoted by the Iuav Project Archive and curated by Gabriella Liva, Marzia Marandola, and Gundula Rakowitz, with the collaboration of Giulia Bersani, Giulia Conti, Alessandro Virgilio Mosetti, and Davide Zaupa, aims to retrace the history of the university through the universal language of drawing.
The exhibition, set up at Magazzino 6 (Dorsoduro 1827, Venice), will open on Thursday, April 16 at 5 PM and will be accessible until July 31, 2026, offering the public a wide timeframe to immerse themselves in a century of creativity and innovation. Opening hours are Monday to Friday, from 9:30 AM to 7 PM, with continuous hours.
“The exhibition stems from a simple idea,” the curators explain, “to retrace the time of Iuav not through archival documents, comparative timelines, academic intertwining, or prominent personalities, but through drawing: the germinal, ephemeral, and eternal act that projects the idea into the forms of the future.” The 100 selected drawings tell a century of history and stories, mostly coming from the Iuav Project Archive, and document the plurality of disciplinary facets that have characterized the university: masters, students, architects, urban planners, designers, theater artists, and scholars of various disciplines.
In this perspective, drawing is configured as a synthesis between representation and construction of thought, between theoretical rigor and experimentation, between method and technique. The hundred drawings narrate not only the events of a School but also the transformations of architecture over a century: languages change, tools evolve from pencil to digital, and themes shift, but the centrality of drawing as a tool for prefiguration, expression, and critical investigation remains constant.
A chronological timeline guides the exhibition path, which develops from 1926 over a century, presenting one hundred ideal frames of a film that summarizes a cultural epic. Each drawing can be traced back to a teacher, or to groups of teachers, or, though rarely, to a distinguished student; each drawing evokes through its graphic style and subject the multiple stages of project development and the changes in disciplinary culture and carries a story: it evokes a pivotal competition, a crucial moment in the 20th and 21st centuries.
The exhibition unfolds continuously across four rooms, where large tables display the drawings. The graphic corpus is heterogeneous and reflects the complexity and succession of experiences over a century, revealing continuity and discontinuity in language, methods, and project purposes: sketches, urban studies, diagrams, interpretative maps, educational exercises, and experimental representations.
Along the walls runs the historical timeline from 1926 to the present day, where dates and protagonists are associated, highlighting the cycles of rectorships, changes in statutes, and the number of students. Vertical panels, each dedicated to a five-year period, summarize data and information that reconstruct the transition from the Higher School of Architecture to the Iuav University of Venice.
The first drawings testify to the founding years when the Higher School of Architecture was building a new and different identity, replacing that imprinted by the Academy of Fine Arts, from which it is descended. The exhibition opens with a sketch by Brenno Del Giudice for the poster of the XV Venice Biennale of Art, owned by the Wolfsoniana Palazzo Ducale Foundation for Culture in Genoa. A series of works documents architectural competitions from the early post-war period: the board by Giuseppe Torres and Carlo Keller for the competition for the new passenger building of the Florence S. Maria Novella station; a perspective by Virgilio Vallot for the competition for the new Venetian Santa Lucia station and the project for the Bassano bridge by Guido Costante Sullam, owned by the Civic Museums Foundation of Venice. Some drawings reveal the innovative and experimental tension of the post-war period when Iuav earned its role as an international laboratory for the renewal of the discipline with the contribution of prominent figures, such as Carlo Scarpa, whose way of drawing, composed of layers, minute details, and continuous variations, is among the most intense and original examples of the relationship between drawing and construction. A large drawing (100×150 cm) is exhibited, one of those Scarpa quickly sketched to illustrate what he was explaining in his lectures. Under glass is shown the layout by Egle Renata Trincanato prepared for the volume “Venezia Minore.”
As a natural recurring object, the drawings feature Venice with its monuments and new buildings: Iuav’s role in the city becomes a measure, paradigm, and object of investigation, contributing to a constant reflection on the relationship between environment and cultural heritage. Many drawings relate to Iuav’s locations, generally adaptations of historical architectures, often works by the same teachers. The project for the new entrance of the Tolentini site is illustrated by a drawing from 1938 by Guido Cirilli, preserved in the Archive of the Academy of Fine Arts. In reality, it was only built in 1984 by Sergio Los, but based on a project by Carlo Scarpa. Daniele Calabi in 1960 signed a drawing for the adaptation of the Tolentini convent as the university’s headquarters. The adaptation of the Cotonificio Olcese spaces for teaching purposes is the subject of drawings by Gino Valle and Giorgio Macola; static checks on the building are outlined by the renowned engineer Franco Levi. Drawing Venice has meant, and still means, studying its urban morphology, understanding its historical stratification, and questioning the relationship between architecture, water, infrastructure, and landscape.
“100 drawings for 100 years” celebrates the vitality of an archive, a silent yet eloquent witness to the centrality of the Iuav University of Venice in the genesis of contemporary design, confirming the primacy of drawing as a scientific and creative practice.
The exhibition “100 drawings for 100 years” represents a unique opportunity to celebrate the history and excellence of the Iuav University of Venice, an institution that has been training the protagonists of Italian and international architecture and design for a century. A journey through drawing, a universal and timeless language, to discover the roots of our future.
