Connections, relationships, balance of weight and volumes: a common lexicon shared by jewellery and architecture.

A piece of jewellery is an object open to multiple readings, the first traditionally being aesthetic, regarding both the intrinsic beauty of the work and the idea of beauty that a jewel succeeds in conveying and transmitting. Alongside this plane exists structural research, in which what counts is the complexity of the structure of the jewellery and therefore the idea and the form. Here jewellery design finds many factors in common with architecture: albeit with different ends and scales, jewellery and architecture both relate to the body in movement, to which they respond with a structure capable of “inhabiting” that body or allowing it to inhabit a space.

The exhibition explores this tie between the large and small scales, taking a new approach to certain features of the world of contemporary jewellery highlighted in the work of great international masters: Babetto, Bielander, Britton, Cecchi, Chang, Sajet.

The jewellery is presented together with the preparatory drawings so as to illustrate the development of the design process and the execution of the one-off and limited edition pieces, a process very different to that of industrial jewellery. Exhibited alongside these pieces are a selection of architectural models from the MAXXI Architettura collection that interact with the jewellery as pure structural suggestions, following the formal conjugations and expressive registers of the designers.