The exhibition Data Mining. Principi di proto-design for disassembly nei brevetti del secondo Novecento was inaugurated on 16 February 2026 at Casa dell’Architettura, in conjunction with the conference Upcycling Architecture in Italy. Smontare, riutilizzare, costruire.

Curated by Alberto Bologna and Roberto Germanò (Sapienza Università di Roma), Ilaria Giannetti and Giulia Sergi (Università degli Studi di Roma Tor Vergata), with Emanuela Fiorletta (Archivio Centrale dello Stato), the exhibition presents the results of a systematic data mining activity conducted on the historical archive of the Ufficio Italiano Brevetti e Marchi (UIBM), preserved at Archivio Centrale dello Stato.

The exhibition systematically illustrates the complete data mining work carried out over the two-year research project on invention patents. Through a progressive lexical filtering methodology applied to patent titles, more than 500 documents were identified and subsequently reduced to a corpus of 100 inventions produced between 1945 and 1980. The investigation reconstructs technological and design trajectories that anticipated contemporary principles of circularity, reversibility, and component independence.

Three main trajectories emerge and define the curatorial framework of the exhibition:

Trajectory 1 – Reuse of war rubble in the immediate post-war period (riuso delle macerie nel primo dopoguerra)

Trajectory 2 – Development of reversible modular systems in concrete and brick (sviluppo di sistemi modulari reversibili in calcestruzzo e laterizio)

Trajectory 3 – Development of metal structural frame systems based on joint mechanics (affermazione di strutture a scheletro metallico fondate sulla meccanica del giunto)

For each of these trajectories, the exhibition presents selected patents included in the data mining corpus, illustrating specific construction systems, technical solutions, and design principles that prefigure what can be interpreted as a proto–Design for Disassembly. These micro-histories outline the foundations of such an approach and offer an operational framework for contemporary circular design practices.

The outcomes of this research have been consolidated in the publication Proto–Design for Disassembly: Compendium of Patents and Annotated Bibliography, available in Open Access at the following link.