—Room With a View is an installation commissioned for Stop Drawing. Architecture Beyond Representation, an exhibition at the MAXXI museum in Rome exploring the ongoing transformations within the world of architecture and the tools used to create, represent and communicate it.

Room With a View

Installation
Lucia Tahan

Room With a View is a free-standing wunderkammer in which the boundaries between physical and virtual architecture blur. 

Visitors entering the room can see a virtual sky beyond the ceiling: the “view”. Both sound and vision are controlled, as the room absorbs sound thanks to its anechoic chamber insulation.

The installation speaks of awe at technological advances, and simultaneous unease as they mediate human perception.  

Room With a View. Photo: Asier Rua

Stop Drawing. Architecture Beyond Representation

Exhibition
MAXXI. National Museum of 21st Century Arts
18 April 2025 - 21 September 2025

Together with society, architecture and the tools used to create and communicate it evolve. This exhibition explores these transformations through the evolution of its primary medium: drawing.

Works by significant figures—some drawn from the MAXXI Collection—accompany visitors on a journey through the 20th and 21st centuries. They illustrate how the ability to represent and define space, once the exclusive domain of drawing, has now expanded to include a world of digital simulations, collages, videos, performances, textiles, and more. These new representational forms can profoundly reshape the future of architecture and spatial disciplines.

The exhibition is structured in five sections: MAXXI Collection, Digital, Activist, Artistic, and Back to Drawing. “The journey begins with the first section, dedicated to digital architecture. This is introduced by an immersive, experiential installation by Lucia Tahan that blends physical space with last generation technology. Visitors then encounter a range of works that trace the evolution of digital design culture — from early pioneers like Nicholas Negroponte to contemporary platforms such as SCI-Arc.”, in the words of the curator Pippo Ciorra.

Some of the work shown includes: Frank Gehry’s original model of the Walt Disney auditorium in Los Angeles, collages by Superstudio, drawings by Aldo Rossi, drawing tables used by Carlo Scarpa, artwork by Olafur Eliasson and a textile piece by Frida Escobedo.

Room With a View

Room With a View embodies the spirit of the digital realm through a chamber composed of abstract physical elements, where a virtual sky becomes the central figure. Evoking the historical concept of the wunderkammer, the work offers a reflection on the act of seeing, perceiving, and experiencing space through purely virtual mediations.

With its immersive approach, the piece invites the audience into a contemplative yet unsettling pause, suggesting that representation is not limited to lines or objects, but can also unfold as a sensory and critical experience.

The installation consists of a cubic room measuring 3x3x3 meters, covered both inside and out with acoustic foam. It functions as an anechoic chamber—completely isolated from sound and devoid of reverberation. Once inside, the visitor is guided to lie down on a chaise longue and can observe a hyperreal digital sky that replaces the ceiling of the room. The space is projected without horizons, tricking the senses.

The architecture of the room is presented as abstract, made up of geometric solids like pyramids and parallelepipeds, reminiscent of 3D and digital visual languages. However, the chosen colors and furnishings reference the work of Le Corbusier and Charlotte Perriand. Meanwhile, the sky is rendered hyperrealistically, inverting the formal language of the physical and the virtual.

“I wanted to create a poetic yet threatening atmosphere — an experience in which the audience drifts in and out of awareness that they are in a mediated environment.”

The installation expresses both a fascination with the progress of the digital realm and a discomfort with its power to mediate human perception.

Room With a View proposes not just an architectural concept, but also an invitation to silence, to the senses, and to a painterly experience of digital space—a call to look beyond the physical, toward horizons suspended between architecture and unreality.

Sound design

While the space seems to open infinitely, within the room, sounds and silences evoke an artificial landscape, in a soundscape composed by the artist Ignacio Furones and developed during a series of workshops with Brian Eno in January 2025. Immersed in this atmosphere, the visitor is transported beyond the physicality of the space for a few minutes, as their senses of hearing and sight are mediated by technology.

The spatial sound consists of layered loops in four different channels (coming out of four speakers in the room: above, below, left and right), with the sounds representing the sky and ground. A baseline continuity is broken by two elements: high-pitched klangs and silences. The silences are especially emotive as the chamber is nearly anechoic, therefore the silences are almost absolute. The klangs startle the visitors, rendering them aware of their environment.

More about Stop Drawing. Architecture Beyond Representation

In harmony with the fluid layout and terraced spaces of Gallery 3, the exhibition route, designed by studio DEMOGO, unfolds through a series of supports and environments of varying scale, where the works emerge like islands in a narrative archipelago. Invited to find a balance between the order imposed by spatial sequence and their own perceptual path, visitors are guided through the five sections of the exhibition, each narrating different approaches and multiple perspectives on the evolution of architecture over time.

Section 1. MAXXI Collection

The vast archive of authored drawings from the MAXXI Architecture Collection marks the beginning of the exhibition route, occupying the picture gallery along the gallery’s ramp with works and representations by masters such as Carlo Scarpa, Aldo Rossi and Giancarlo De Carlo. Ranging from more conventional renderings to visionary compositions, this section bears witness to the role that drawing has played as a tool of cultural and disciplinary hegemony – particularly in Italy – during a recent phase in the history of architecture.

Section 2. Digital

The disappearance of traditional media goes hand in hand with the rise of new technologies, which on one hand simplify the architect’s work, and on the other stimulate imagination by opening new avenues for research.

The digital section is explored through the pioneering Generator Project (1978–1980) by Cedric Price & John Frazer, reflections and studies on the computerisation of architecture collected by Nicholas Negroponte in the interview The Architecture Machine (1970), and by many others including Matias del Campo & Sandra Manninger and Lucia Tahan, who for two decades have contributed to the discourse on parametric, generative, algorithmic and hyper-modern architecture, radically influencing how projects are represented.

Section 3. Activist

When architecture becomes a civil and political act, addressing the most pressing issues of our time - ecology, resource management, inclusion, racial and gender equality, post-humanism and decolonisation - two main operative directions emerge, both represented in the section dedicated to “activists”. Berlin’s Floating University (2019–2022) by Raumlabor and the Sexy Assemblage project by the Orizzontale collective provide examples of how practical, performative engagement aims at direct political involvement of communities.

Section 4. Artistic

In the artistic section, architecture is enriched by new languages and tools, extending the boundaries of representation, conceptualisation and design experimentation. As Hans Hollein once foresaw, everything can be architecture: Frank Gehry, Enric Miralles and Benedetta Tagliabue, November Wong, Olafur Eliasson, Frida Escobedo, Gordon Matta-Clark, Cyprien Gaillard, Philippe Rahm and Hollein himself are just a few of the artists and architects who, through collages, textile works, illustrated narratives, virtual realities and bodies in motion, show how every gesture can become an architectural act.

Section 5. Return to drawing

Within the digital realm, drawing not only survives but becomes the guardian of an ideological and artistic legacy: the works of Jorinde Voigt, Jo Noero, Atelier Bow-Wow, Jimenez Lai (Bureau Spectacular), Maria Giuseppina Grasso Cannizzo and CAMPO firmly defend the traditional, technical and expressive space of drawing as a true statement of method, in which hand-drawn representation re-emerges as a conscious choice, bringing the narrative of the exhibition to a close.