Performing Architecture

Performing Architecture is a citywide festival that brings together architecture and performance art to transform urban space alongside its inhabitants.

A collaboration between BASE and DOPO?, the festival invites a new generation of architects to explore architecture as a living practice—one that questions conventions and opens new possibilities for social interaction. Through performances, installations, and public actions, the festival experiments with hybrid design approaches, where bodies and spaces interact to reshape how we experience the city. This multidisciplinary process not only intersects architecture, culture, and education but also contributes to making urban life richer, more inclusive, and more engaging.

The festival connects five districts in Milan’s southern outskirts—Corvetto, Chiaravalle, Stadera, Barona, and Tortona—creating a symbolic route that links and rethinks these spaces.

Each district hosts a site-specific intervention—a temporary installation—designed by an architect and a performer in collaboration with a local organisation. Five districts, five ways of rethinking architecture.