“What we call progress is this storm”.
In this meeting with you about my architecture, I make reference to this essay of Mr. Benjamin because I want to introduce you in the world of the European and Italian contemporary architecture differently from how the specialized magazines usually do.
I want to tell you that every architect follows his own path, his own research and he consequently has his own language.
In 1984 I had the opportunity to co-operate, for a short time, with the Swiss architect Mario BOTTA.
Shortly before my degree I started my experience in University of Architecture in Venice in laboratory with Master Architect Aldo ROSSI, which characterized my entire path.
Ten years of projects, studies, teaching by the Architecture University of Venice (where I still do the same), trips, memos that, in some way, gave a good boost to my personal research, to my language.
The architecture that I’m going to show you discusses my newest foreign projects, specifically in China, Japan and Romania.
The used language is banded to a varied research, pursued through observed and studied cities, read books, glanced magazines and, above all, history of Italian art, rich of suggestions, images and colours.
It’s not by chance that I get, with great passion, three specializations in this Italian history Art, of 1200, 1400 and 1500 ages.
This doesn’t mean that I suffer from ancient things, that I identify myself with the beauty cult in the old-fashioned way, that I copy one style or I try to explain it, taking peaces scattered everywhere.
My projects work with the city, talk with the history of the city, its culture, its signs, its axes, its lights and colours.
My projects insist on the meaning of the memory, individual and collective (in the city sense), without quotations, they interpret the sign of time and make it modern or, better, contemporary.
I think Architecture as piece of Art.
The projects work by fragments. What does it mean?
It means to work by using real of fictitious, concretion of imagined peaces, that however make sense in the architectonic language and enrich the architecture.
The projects represent a will to crumble like solid volume even remaining always the same, they deconstruct themselves in different parts, even remaining always the same, giving other messages, other reading of the building.
Once upon a time the cities were built on a human-being proportion.
Nowadays, for many reasons, everything is changed and, under the progress sign, much buildings has gone on, not remembering the story of the city, the local culture, the native colours and materials, the perspective plays, etcetera.
Forgetting the values of the past.
Every construction was bound to the others with proportioned and sensitive interventions, even if built in different times, by different builders, different architects.
The architectural language of the city was richer.
When the materials are too expansive, if you use the colours, also the simplest buildings can seem an architectural “collage”, giving different emotions, various meanings.
My Architecture is very different from what can be seen at large, on many magazines. When I project a district, for instance, it is my natural impulse to do it by parts, using different typologies, forms, materials and colours.
It is an architecture which surely reflects the architect’s personality, his culture, research and language, but it expresses also the intelligence to give to this part of the city not the same language, ordinary; everything has not to be equalized (identical houses, same roofs, identical prospects, equal windows, …). This in order to show which concept? Not obviously a concept of cheapness, but a lack of courage, absence of research, culture and creativity.
The architecture is a cultural expression, it is an idea which comes true, it is the story of your past, the dream of your future, it is essentially a desire of life.
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