Opening this week at Rome’s MAXXI is an exhibition honoring the late Alessandro Anselmi. Curated by his son and associate Valentino Anselmi and Valerio Palmieri, this important exhibition consists of 100 exquisite drawings, models, and watercolors from the 1960s through 2002. The show is organized thematically to lead the viewer through various aspects of Anselmi’s ouerve: the Architect’s Dream, the Geometry of Memory, the Figuration of the Modern, Fragments and Enclosures, Geometrized Nature.

Among the projects on view are his cemetery of Parabita in Puglia, the State Archive in Florence, the restructuring of Piazza dei Navigatori in Rome. The exhibition highlights an architect who was in many ways radical, but fully inserted into the dynamics of the contemporary debate, but always guided by a passion for history, and intensely sensitive to issues of place and context. One senses his profoundly Roman formation. His vision—intimate and almost oneiric—allowing us to speculate on its possible metaphysical influences.