Fondazione ICA Milano presents the exhibition Wonders of the Modern World, curated by Pier Paolo Tamburelli and Anna Livia Friel, with photographs and videos by Giovanna Silva and Giulio Squillacciotti, and a sound installation by Nicola Ratti. The exhibition, open to the public free of charge from Wednesday, March 26 to Friday, July 11, 2025, explores some “wonders of the modern world”—buildings and landscapes where large masses of people gather to celebrate collective rituals.

The exhibition, set up on the ground floor of the Foundation, features eight wonders, including the Great Mosque of Touba, the Sambódromo in Rio, and the Basilica of Notre Dame de la Paix, built as a replica of St. Peter’s in Yamoussoukro in the 1980s. The eight wonders are represented by eight glass models, as well as videos and sounds that convey their ritualistic dimension. The exhibition stems from research conducted by the Department of Gestaltungslehre and Design at the Technical University of Vienna, presented to the public for the first time.

Wonders of the Modern World reflect on modern architecture and its limits.
The wonders, which were once fully part of the classical architecture corpus, have been excluded from the phenomena that modern architecture has chosen to focus on. Yet the world, in these modern centuries, has continued to produce fantastic and improbable monuments. Wonders of the Modern World is an attempt to observe these immense buildings without pretending they no longer exist.

Wonders of the Modern World reflect on modern architecture and its limits. The wonders, which were once fully part of the classical architecture corpus, have been excluded from the phenomena that modern architecture has chosen to focus on. Yet the world, in these modern centuries, has continued to produce fantastic and improbable monuments. Wonders of the Modern World is an attempt to observe these immense buildings without pretending they no longer exist.

The exhibition opens with three large photographs by Giovanna Silva, while in a dimly lit space, eight colored glass architectural models, made at a 1:750 scale and illuminated from within, emerge. The models provide an abstract representation of the architectural complexes, eliminating hyper-realistic details and human figures to focus solely on their spatial grammar.

The exhibition is enriched by videos that nar- rate the relationship between architecture and rituality. Eight smaller video sequences illustrate individual monumental complexes. The footage, taken by Giovanna Silva, shows the movement of the crowd in deliberately fixed and monumental architectural spaces.

A film by Giulio Squillacciotti offers a unified view of the wonders, intertwining different scenarios into a continuous narrative. The sound installation by Nicola Ratti completes the exhibition, providing the acoustic expe- rience of gestures and movements within space.

The “wonders” presented in the exhibition are: the Great Mosque of Touba during the Grand Magal celebration, the Batu Caves in Kuala Lumpur during the Thaipusam festival, the Catholic sanctuary of Fátima, the faces of U.S. presidents sculpted on Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, the large fair hosting the Oktoberfest in Munich, the Sambódromo in Rio de Janeiro during Carnival, the Basilica of Notre Dame de la Paix in Yamoussoukro, and the Cronaca della Georgia monument in Tbilisi.

With Wonders of the Modern World, Fondazione ICA Milano invites the public to explore extraordinary places where history, architecture, and ritual intertwine, offering a fresh perspective on the forms and meanings of contemporary architecture.

Thanks to the Austrian Cultural Forum in Milan for its support in the realization of the exhibition, Finstral GmbH and KME Group for their support in the production of the models.

ICA Milano thanks Banca Intesa Sanpaolo, the official sponsor of the Foundation, and Valsoia for their support of ICA Milano’s programming and activities.