Plessi Museum, Brennero, A22 HighWay

Architect: Carlo Costa
Text: György Szegő
Photos: Andrea Fábián, Oskar da Riz

Inaugurated this year, it is promoted on the worldwide net with this slogan: „the first museum ever along the Italian highways”. It has a single unsurpassable architectural prototype: the first highway-church, which is a fantastic organic-Modernist architecture by Giovanni Michelucci along Autostrada del Sole (1964). This latter building has grown far beyond just being the House of the Lord.
It is not only a highway museum, but also the gate of the autonomy of South Tirol in Italy and the welfare of a minority – simultaneously the meeting of a new motorised lifestyle with cultic-cultural traditions, a symbol of the relationship between the landscape and people, an authentic expression of the current genius loci, in which contemporary art also bore and is still bearing autonomous characteristics today.