A CITY MANIFESTO

JOSEPH DI PASQUALE

Tarkovskij said: “There is only one journey that the man can do, is the journey to find his own soul”. Therefore travelling and working around the world an architect is looking for his identity and for the sense of his architecture. How to satisfy the growing desire of identity in a fully globalized world? What about the cultural differences and their features? How do the web network create a sense of proximity to change the city and preserve communities and their cultural identities? How can the emerging world wide language of icons effect symbolic values in architecture figuration? What is next after functionalism, postmodernism, decostructivism, bigness and sustainalbility in architecture? Are the “times of theories” gone? Can the practice, the “culture of doing” and the symbols replace and, once for all, end the totalitarian illuministic approach?

A CITY MANIFESTO

"...this book is a screenplay to tell the story of a trip through an “architectural world” represented by this imaginary city, a “saga” in the architectural cosmogony that has been built during decades of a living professional practice."

JOSEPH DI PASQUALE

O T Y S T I E a F C g I a s s e l A AN d a r o u s i t c p M e e t i x ch si ar in

4

5

INDEX

6 7

INDEX 14 JOSEPH DI PASQUALE:

A CITY MANIFESTO

ARCHITECTURAL SAGA IN SIX EPISODES

18 EPISODE 1:

ICONIC ARCHITECTURE THE FUNCTION OF THE SHAPE

030

046

056

068

088

096

104

112

122

134

170

184

196

210

222

236

252

266

280

288

314

322

334

346

148 EPISODE 2:

THE EXO-GRAM

IDENTITY SHAPING IN ARCHITECTURE

160

300 EPISODE 3:

DENSITY AND IDENTITY SHALL WE DENSE THE CITY?

364 EPISODE 4:

FACE AND FACADE

ARCHITECTURE GLANCE AND URBAN SPACE

376

386

394

408

418

424

434

446

486

496

506

518

530

540

550

562

586

596

614

622

634

648

664

462 EPISODE 5:

CULTURAL SUSTAINABILITY

472

KNOWING WHERE I AM AND WHO I AM

574 EPISODE 6:

THE IDEAL OF “SUSTAINABLE” A POST-ILLUMINIST APPROACH

8

9

VIDEO INDEX EPISODE 1:

EPISODE 4:

THE FUNCTION OF THE SHAPE

ARCHITECTURE GLANCE AND URBAN SPACE

ICONIC ARCHITECTURE

FACE AND FACADE

EPISODE 5:

CULTURAL SUSTAINABILITY KNOWING WHERE I AM AND WHO I AM

EPISODE 2:

THE EXO-GRAM

IDENTITY SHAPING IN ARCHITECTURE

EPISODE 6:

THE IDEAL OF “SUSTAINABLE” A POST-ILLUMINIST APPROACH

EPISODE 3:

DENSITY AND IDENTITY SHALL WE DENSE THE CITY?

10

11

A CITY MANIFESTO

JOSEPH DI PASQUALE:

12 13

A CITY MANIFESTO JOSEPH DI PASQUALE

“

I have always had an instinctive revulsion for what the architects say describing their work, including me of course. In fact, I always find inappropriate speech descriptive of real work.

It’s like going on to describe architecture instead of getting closer to understanding it. The contemplation and silence, I believe, are the only real possible descriptive summary of a work.

“Architecture for me is not just a profession but a physical need.”

Over the past ten years as studio we have “generated” more than one hundred and twenty

14

I do not see myself as a traditional architect, but as an architectural storyteller.” competition projects, some of which have become buildings, others have won but were not implemented, some have not won anything and some has even been lost in shipment or has not arrived in time! Nobody has commissioned this work. The competitions were in fact only the “pretext” to meet this physical need.

I’m talking about physical need because the relationship with the projects for me is absolutely physical. I’ve lived through what might be called an ascetic of the project, understood as a process involving the body’s cognitive awareness.

This awareness starts from the conception and the discourse on the topic, identifying a concept, which passes to influence and determine the architectural material and space defined by it.

15

16

After university for ten years from 1991 to 2001 I became interested in the profession and especially “matter” that is, the material reality of architecture. We could say that I did, “bricklayer”, attending and acting physically in the act of building. I did not care about theoretical discourse, in which I was even impatient (and some still are), but only and exclusively the “physical matter” of architecture, where I learned about the cold and harsh rules. The “matter” and the space it defines are disciplines that must undergo stringent for many years before even starting to understand how to steer the endless and amazing energy with which you can configure them.

chitectural world” represented by this imaginary city, a “saga” in the architectural cosmogony that has been built in decades of living professinonal practice, a day by day artistic project that starts from clients, ideas, construction, failure, solutions, competitions, and so on. It is therefore not a theoretical thesis which is crashing into an antithesis producing a practical synthesis, but rather a theory that emerges after and into the practice, which is the desire for creative consistency with a single vision of the true binder that allows the “non theory” to emerge and manifest, exaclty like a plot in a movie is not steated in theory but emerges from the facts that the screenplay has shown to the pubilc.

After ten years I became interested in studying film at New York Academy of New York. I was most interested in the vision and its symbolic and expressive power of synthesis, the economy of the “storytelling” and the narrative of the story. These elements have been the premise, and perhaps the cause, of a renewed willingness to search for expression and narrative in architecture. In fact, right after film I became interested in ‘symbolic language’ and ‘narrative’ in architecture. It was not always a conscious and planned research but rather a “stretch of desire” a “center of gravity” to which creativity was constantly and irresistibly attracted. This journey that began in 2004 took its unequivocal clarity of the proposition. Seen in retrospect it was like the process in which it has gradually been given shape to an entire city by designing individual buildings one at a time.

Tarkovskij said: “There is only one journey that the man can do, is the journey to find his own soul”.

This book is therefore an ex post reconstruction of this “city that is not” architecture, a CITY MANIFEST obtained by composing together single urban imaginary architectures, forty projects of all those that I have designed over the last ten years. At the same time this book is a screenplay to tell the story of a trip through an “ar-

Therefore travelling and working around the world an architect is looking for his identity and for the sense of his architecture. How to satisfy the growing desire of identity in a fully globalized world? What about the cultural differences and their features? How do the web network create a sense of proximity to change the city and preserve communities and their cultural identities?

How can the emerging world wide language of icons effect symbolic values in architecture figuration? What is next after functionalism, postmodernism, decostructivism, bigness and sustainalbility in architecture? Are the “times of theories” gone? Can the practice, the “culture of doing” and the symbols replace and, once for all, end the totalitarian illuministic approach?

Joseph di Pasquale

17

ICONIC ARCHITECTURE

EPISODE 1:

18 19

“ 20

Icons have completly changed our way to communicate.

This is creating new possibilities also in the architectural language.�

21

EPISODE 1:

ICONIC ARCHITECTURE THE FUNCTION OF THE SHAPE

Form does not follow function, form has to take on its own autonomy, its own role and we hope to be provocative in stating that form is in itself function.

“

Form follows function, it has been said. “Form follows fiasco”, was someone’s reply. “Formalists!” howled the soviet party officially and threateningly against the constructivist architects who nurtured a certain satisfaction.

It was onsidered bourgeois and decadent, at the sensual exaltation of architecture’s external appearance. Sensuality, form and satisfaction. According to the “politically correct” architectural culture, Anglo-Saxon interpretation of Lutheran-Calvinist Puritanism, seems associated with remote prohibitions and guilt feelings. however, at the same time with an unconfessed attraction, which the iconoclastic protestant fury has been unable to repress completely. It was actually at the time of the

22

The serious fault of the ‘masters’ is to have denied the formal component of their work, intentionally developing a theory, that not only ignored it, but rather blamed it to a subordinate role with only respect to function itself.”

Lutheran Reformation that the spiritual union, or “sinolo” as Aristotle would call it, between the object and its form was transformed into a dualism, into a more or less successful composition of two basically divergent concepts.

From then on culture, and consequently also art, followed two different programmatic lines.

The Latin-speaking Roman Catholic world reacted with an over-exaltation of form and perceptive sensuality, categorically rejecting the interpretation of sinfulness as formulated by the Protestants. The Kingdom of Heaven transformed churches into extraordinary media tools where the faithful were violently struck by voluptuous architectural forms, by liturgies

23

designed for maximum theatrical effect, even arriving at the diffusion of music and perfumed essences, earthly sensorial foretastes of the heavenly delights promised.

The specific point in which the Reformation and Counter Reformation were in theological and philosophical disagreement concerned the moral judgement of sensorial pleasure. For Protestants, gratification of the senses was inherently negative and sinful, while for Catholics gratification related with perception was neither positive nor negative in itself, but its moral value depended on the content it transmitted. The doctrine of the Counter Reformation went further in order to counterbalance the doctrinal error of the Protestants. The Protestants tended to encourage a “formful” aesthetic, full of expressiveness but also as a propaganda tool to contrast with the dismal, bare churches of the Central European apostates. There is no doubt that the modern architectural movement has been deeply affected by the Lutheran-Calvinist approach.

“Ornament and crime”, “Less is more”, “Existent minimum” and also “Form follows function” are all expressions that are castigated by a kind of artistic asceticism that downgrade formal aspects to a secondary role with respect

24

to other values that are considered more important. But passion for form also emerges repeatedly in the modern movement as explosive and creative energy. The question of style, and hence of a complete, formal code, which was considered the original sin of the hated Academy by the “Functionalists”, re-emerges inevitably in Le Corbusier’s “Five Points of Modern Architecture”, in Max Bill’s “Gute Form”, and is finally proclaimed in Mies Van Der Rohe’s postwar International Style.

It was Peter Blake who in 1978 declared the defeat and failure of the Lutheran-Calvinist line of the Modern Movement, when he wrote, “Form Follows Fiasco” and explained why modern architecture hasn’t worked.

“What were supposed to be the cities of the future, with green areas, air and light, have actually become suburbs, horrible ghettos, synonyms of physical and moral degradation and segregation.”

Architectural practice that followed the functionalists’ theorisations has imploded on itself, annihilated, because it has neglected in its programming to consider the desire for form as a necessary component in the civil and social representatively of architecture and hence essential to its very survival, but to return to today. Contemporary society has evolved from an industrial society to a postindustrial society and, in the 1990’s, a society of the computer and communication revolution.

The electronics and Internet “reform” have led to the instant accessibility of an infinite wealth of information. This has led to the great “counter-reformist” effort arising from the need to find a direction and to direct, to communicate one’s own identity attractively and as clearly, rapidly and effectively as possible.

The penalty: electronic annihilation, cyber extinction. If you don ‘t exist on the Internet then you don’t exist at all. It is here that, in my opinion, it is possible to establish a parallel between our age and the period of the Counter-Reformation. Considering the affinities in aesthetic taste between these two, apparently distant, moments in history. Pleasure related to sensorial perception becomes a category that extends to all categories of the

visible. A virtual world, characterised by an increasingly high level of aesthetic involvement, makes it increasingly difficult to accept a reality that departs significantly from that ideal of perfection.

“The attempt is to give architecture an iconic force, making a single compositional exemplar that universally communicates formal and symbolic volumetric emotions, with meaning and senses referring to the civil, institutional or simply private role of a building.”

We have therefore tried to eliminate our absurd belief that form in architecture is in some way determined by functional organisation.

After all the functionalist motto “form follows function” is more superstition: a desire to

25

The cylinder is also the basis of Alspund’s composition for the Library of Stockholm (1928). In 1986 Stirling partly redeveloped Boullée’s theme in his design far the competition to design the French National Library in Paris. In our competition design for the National Technical Library in Prague (1999) our composition attempted to interpret this volumetric icon as a mechanism, given the technical specialisation of the library. The cylinder hence became a mechanical part, which formally “infected” the other rotating elementsgears in the complex. The discovery of this possibility of sensory connection between the cylinder as an architectural icon and mechanical movement was the basis of our choice for Polini Motori. The compositional icon was not then related to the library function, but had its own life, a “life of forms” as Focillon put it. In the functional transposition it lost no energy, but actually acquired it in relation to the new meanings for which it was to be a reference.

establish a cause-effect relationship between phenomena that in reality are absolutely independent. How would a functionalist explain, for example, the masterly re-use of an old building for a new function? Rather than form being “consequent” to function, we should discuss the “compatibility” of the two terms, meaning the possibility that the one is not deduced from the other but that while each maintains its own generative autonomy neither contradicts the other, and there is world of difference between non-contradiction and consequentiality.

The rationalist corollary had an undisputed operative advantage, however, exorcising the bogeyman of invention, of reducing creativity to measurability, to predictability. A rationalist wouldn’t allow a theory where, to explain the origins of architectural form, words such as “inspiration”, “imagination”, “symbol”, “tradition” or “composition”, to name a few, were used. It was necessary to find a simple, above all deductive yardstick for eliminating and selecting options and facilitating choice.

When all is possible, nothing is possible, but

26

if we find a law that has the effect of outlawing a whole series of options, the choice is drastically reduced and “legal” solutions take shape.

Our tentative response to the question consisted in considering form no longer as a consequence of something else but as a function among functions, that is, considering the possibility of the existence of a “function of shape”. Shape could then actually be useful in communicating the civil, institutional, manufacturing, residential, private or collective content as desired, working through a highly symbolic, almost iconic composition of the volumes and compositional elements, which unequivocally refer to the particular content.

Let us attempt to trace the route that led to the formal definition of the Polini Motori building. Boullée’s state library, a development of the cylindrical volume elevated to become an iconic symbol of the cultural, institutional and civic function of the building, has become a sort of iconographic format of reference for all the buildings that followed it.

In the compositional-design development of the building for Polini Motori, perception in movement from the main road was the cause of the fraying and formal contamination applied to the cylinder motif by the introduction of the continuous facade for the offices and the horizontal cuts made into the cylindrical sheath. The aim was to modify the form, enhancing the iconic-symbolic function referring to the categories of figurative imagination linked with the world of engines and racing: The aesthetics of mechanics and speed.

This compositional route is a complete alternative to the deduction of form from function.

On the other hand, when we look at the masterpieces of the masters of the modern movement we realise that their architectural and compositional choices depend more on the unpredictable imponderability of poetry than on the positivist determinism of function. The schizophrenia between theory and practice is nothing new. Also with respect to tradition, complete cancellation of past experience is advocated, a genuine tabula rasa, but in practice many “rationalist” architects just re-read, reinterpret and sometimes re-propose traditional or even classical compositional design.

Just consider the close relationship between monastic architecture and Le Corbusier-style formulations for the home.

“It is therefore possible to state that even in these cases, form was by no means a consequence of function, rather it was chasing the aesthetic ideal of modernity, which constituted the emotional heart of their works, real pre-figurative icons of an attractive possible future world.”

The serious fault of the “masters” is to have denied the, albeit present, “formalist” component of their work, intentionally developing a theory that not only ignored it, but rather blamed it, attributing to it a subordinate role with respect to function itself. Then when the ideas resulting from these works became received. Wisdom and the theoretical principles were applied on a large scale, form actually did follow function, both exclusively and deductively, it became a fiasco and modern architecture, the modern city, i.e. the suburbs, became a complete failure.

“What to do?” as Lenin would wonder. Certainly not turn back, returning to historic styles, to the aesthetic relativism of nineteenth-twentieth century eclecticism, of which “functionalism” was just one of the latest modernist applications. In designing the headquarters of Polini Motori and of Palamonti, we have tried to direct our personal search towards the identification of a way, a standard that avoided gratuitousness. Its form does not follow function, form has to take on its own autonomy, its own role and we hope to be provocative in stating that form is itself function, and operates through the emotions it arouses thanks to an iconic and symbolic composition, which interprets and communicates values, expectations and in a certain sense the figurative imagination of the activities, of the life and of the hopes of the people who inhabit it.

27

2003 CLIMBING ARENA 2008 HARMONIUS HANDS TEMPLE 2008 DIAMOND MANSION BUILDING

2009 GUANGZHOU CIRCLE

EPISODE 1:

ICONIC ARCHITECTURE THE FUNCTION OF THE SHAPE

2009 THE GATE OF MILAN 2009 WENJIN ART CENTER 2009 LIVINGLUCE FAIR STAND 2009 DIAMOND HOTEL 2011 CARTOON PARK OFFICE & OPERA

2011 SHANGHAI INTERNATIONAL DESIGN NO. 1

28

29

2003 CLIMBING ARENA

BERGAMO, ITALY, SPORT INVITED COMPETITION FIRST PRIZE

The absence of external walls and the almost hidden climbing arena achieves the results of a less volumetric presence and a better link to the horizontal lines of the land. Using oxidized copper as roof covering gives the building a soft and solid aspect and its green colour is the ideal prosecution of the surrounding landscape. The geometric and structural construction of the building is based on the lines of the climbing walls. A circular beam sustains several double beams and the roof. Inside the circular beam is a big skyline like three mountains that peaks up brightly.

VIDEO 30

31

SECONDARY ROOF STRUCTURE

ROOF

PRIMARY ROOF STRUCTURE

SECONDARY ELEMENTS

PRIMARY ELEMENTS

32

33

LEVEL 0

LEVEL -1

NORTH

34

WEST

LEVEL +1

SOUTH

EAST

35

AXONOMETRIC OF ROOF STRUCTURE

BLADES OF CONCRETE COVER PACKAGE

HOLE 50x50 AIR CHAMBER (FOR GYM) AIR CHAMBER (FOR OFFICE)

DETAIL OF PLENUM AIR PASSAGES

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

2008 HARMONIOUS HANDS TEMPLE

Harmonious Hands Temple is a wedding chappel which shape was inspired by praying hands gestures in different cultures. The united hands also recall the meeting between people, relations and feelings. The chapel is embedded in a context characterized by two hills with strong gradients and was placed in the slope to rejoin access to the hotel, situated on the hill top through a square where celebrations can be held.

NANKIN, CHINA, RELIGIOUS INVITED COMPETITION

VIDEO 46

47

HOTEL

OUTER STRUCTURE PANORAMIC VIEW ROAD

SLOPE

INNER STRUCTURE

CEILING LAKE

PATH AND ENTRANCE

HILL

48

49

50

51

52

LEVEL 0

ROOF PLAN

NORTH

WEST

EAST

SOUTH

53

54

55

2008 DIAMOND MANSION NANHE, CHINA, MIX-USE INVITED COMPETITION FIRST PRIZE

The intention of giving the building a shape that could call the maximum symbolic meanings leads to a central geometrical shape instead of the usual height-developed skyscraper silhouette. The structure of the building is composed by two curved buildings jointed together on the top and at the base, which are dancing and embracing one another. The two buildings are placed on the two opposite sides of the articifial canal and symbolize the two seventh festival characters Niu Lang and Zhi Nu forever devided by the river. The two flat facades reminds the branches of the spoken three that in the legend was talking with the young cowherd boy Niu Lang.

VIDEO 56

57

SUPER PANORAMIC ARPARTMENTS

PANORAMIC RESTAURANT EMERGENCY ESCAPE PATHS ILLUMINATION

PANORAMIC WELLNESS AND POOL PANORAMIC COMMERCIAL GALLERY CONFERENCE ROOM

OFFICE BUILDING

SOLAR PHOTOVOLTAIC PANELS SOLAR THERMAL PANELS HOTEL RESORT

HEATING AND COOLING SYSTEMS

HOT WATER

CENTRAL GEOTHERMAL HEATING AND COOLING

GEOTHERMAL SINKS

58

59

60

34

16

30

10

28

07

24

01

WEST

SUD

61

62

63

64

65

66

67

2009 GUANGZHOU CIRCLE

The main purpose of the landmark building design has been to get the maximum result in terms of memorability for turists and visitors. The key idea to get this target has been to find a strong link with the local traditions and culture of the city. We choose the traditions of the Nanyue King we visited in the museum of Nanyue King Tomb Treasures in Guangzhou. We consider the shape of the double jade disk as the strongest shape inspiration and the perfect starting point for the design. In particular we consider the icon power of the jade disk shape as the most important feature for the building image.

GUANGZHOU, CHINA, MIX-USE, INVITED COMPETITION FIRST PRIZE

VIDEO

VIDEO

VIDEO 68

69

ZHOU OFFICE MR ZHOUMROFFICE

HONG DA XIN YE HONG DA XIN YE GROUP OFFICES GROUP OFFICE INTERNATIONAL INTERNATIONAL STANDARD OFFICES TO RENT STANDARD OFFICE

CHINESE STANDARD CHINESE STANDARD OFFICES OFFICE TO RENT

EMERGENCY ESCAPE EMERGENCY ESCAPE PATH ILLUMINATION PATH ILLUMINATION SOLAR PHTOVALTAIC SOLAR PHOTOVOLTAIC PANELS PANELS

TRADING TRADING ROOM ROOM GDPE GDPE OFFICES OFFICE

SHOPPING SHOPPING MALL MALL

SOLAR SOLAR THERMAL THERMAL PANELS PANELS

HEATING AND COOLING HEATING AND COOLING SYSTEMS

SYSTEMS

GEOTHERMAL GEOTHERMAL CENTRAL CENTRAL HEATING HEATING AND AND COOLING COOLING

HOT HOT WATER WATER

GEOTHERMAL GEOTHERMAL SINKS SINKS

70

71

P

P

P P

P

CAR FLOW TRUCK FLOW PEDESTRIAN FLOW

INFORMATION CENTRE BUILDING (FUTURE OFFI-

EXTENTIONS FASE 58.500 MQ 23 FLOORS

CE/SHOPPING MALL)

32.600 MG 17 FLOORS

WAREHOUSE BUILDING (FUTURE SHOPPING MALL)

104.200 MG 8 FLOORS

COMMERCIAL SQUARE

GUANGZHOU CIRCLE 77.250 MQ 28 FLOORS

PLASTIC EXCHANGE BUILDING 20.000 MQ 6 FLOORS

STAFF HOUSING BUILDING (FUTURE HOTEL) 36.000 MQ 13 FLOORS

72

73

01

07

10

18

22

27

EAST

74

NORTH

75

INTERNAL STRUCTURE

STRUCTURE ABOVE HOLE

76

EXTERNAL STRUCTURE

STRUCTURE ABOVE TRADE ROOM

STRUCTURE HANGING OFFICES

77

VERTICAL SAFETY GLASS

HORIZONTAL SAFETY GLASS

TRAPEZOIDAL SECTION CORRUGATED SHEET

VERTICAL SAFETY GLASS

500/300/23/12 STEEL I SECTION WITH FIRE-RESISTING COATING

VIEW 1 360/170/15/09 STEEL I SECTION WITH FIRE-RESISTING COATING FINISH RAISED FLOOR SYSTEM

SAFETY GLASS

FACTORY BUILT TRANSLUCENT GLASS CORNER

SAFETY GLASS

SUSPENDED ALUMINIUM PERFORATED CEILING PANELS

CONTINOOUS LINEAR AIR DIFFUSOR SLOT

RAISED FLOOR SYSTEM LIGHT TRAVERTINE FINISHING

INTERNAL BLINDS WATERPROOF MEMBRANE

SAFETY GLASS

360/170/15/09 STEEL I SECTION WITH FIRE-RESISTING COATING

SLOPED CONCRETE

LIGHT TRAVERTINE THRESHOLD METAL RAILING FINISH RAISED FLOOR SYSTEM DETAIL 3 RAILING DETAIL

DOWNPIPE

500/300/23/12 STEEL I SECTION WITH FIRE-RESISTING COATING

LIGHTWEIGHT PREFABRICATED CONCRETE FLOWERPOT (AT SAME LEVEL OF RAISED FLOOR)

TRAPEZOIDAL SECTION CORRUGATED SHEET

INTERNAL BLINDS

SUSPENDED ALUMINIUM PERFORATED CEILING PANELS

DETAIL C TERRACE VERTICAL SECTION

CONTINOUS LINEAR AIR DIFFUSOR SLOT

FINISH RAISED FLOOR SYSTEM STRUCTURAL CONCRETE SLAB

TRAPEZOIDAL SECTION CORRUGATED SHEET

STEEL ANGLE

GLASS WITH MATTE INTERIOR

500/300/23/12 STEEL I SECTION WITH FIRE-RESISTING COATING

ALUMINIUM SUBSTRUCTURE

INTERLOCKING CHANNEL ATTACHMENT SYSTEM

400/300/24/13,5 STEEL I SECTION WITH FIRE-RESISTING COATING

SUSPENDED ALUMINIUM PERFORATED CAILING PANELS CONTINOUS LINEAR AIR DIFFUSOR SLOT

INTERNAL BLINDS

INSULATED SANDWICH PANEL NATURAL ALUMINUM FINISHED

SAFETY GLASS

EXTERNAL STONE COATING (TYPE: “STONEPANEL” LIGHT TRAVERTINE FINISHING)

FACTORY ATTACHED AND BONDED CORNER

SAFETY GLASS

DETAIL A FACADE VERTICAL SECTION

FINISH RAISED FLOOR SYSTEM

STRUCTURAL CONCRETE SLAB TRAPEZOIDAL SECTION CORRUGATED SHEET

DETAIL 2 SILK-SCREENED GLASS TEXTURE 1:1

ALUMINIUM SUBSTRUCTURE

STEEL ANGLE 400/300/24/13,5 STEEL I SECTION WITH FIRE-RESISTING COATING

500/300/23/12 STEEL I SECTION WITH FIRE-RESISTING COATING FLUSH WINDOW CARDBOARD PANELS DETAIL 1 FLUSH WINDOW HEAD DETAIL

SUSPENDED ALUMINIUM PERFORATED CAILING PANELS

CONTINOUS LINEAR AIR DIFFUSOR SLOT INTERNAL BLINDS

DETAIL 2 SILK-SCREENED GLASS TEXTURE

SAFETY SILK-SCREENED GLASS (SAME COLOR OF STONE COATING PANELS) PANEL LIGHT TRAVERTINE FINISHING ALUMINIUM SUBSTRUCTURE

INTERLOCKING CHANNEL

EXTERNAL STONE COATING (TYPE: “STONEPANEL” LIGHT TRAVERTINE FINISHING)

EXTERNAL STONE COATING (TYPE: “STONEPANEL” LIGHT TRAVERTINE FINISHING)

400/300/24/13,5 STEEL I SECTION WITH FIRE-RESISTING COATING FLUSH WINDOW CARDBOARD PANELS

78

SAFETY SILK-SCREENED GLASS (THE GLLASS AND THE STONE COATING MUST BE COPLANAR) ALUMINIUM WINDOW FRAME

79

80

81

82

83

84

85

86

87

The competition includes the area between the train station and Terminal 1 of Malpensa International Airport, the construction of a space/path covered with considerable aesthetic value and impact, that in addition to attracting for its intrinsic value can become an opportunity of events, exhibitions and related activities and, due to its location, might be the “Gateway to Mila�. The project is developed as a part of this request and investigates the concept of a gate that becomes a new symbol for Milan. A mechanism that rotates around a central space, multifunctional to make a path full of life.

2009 THE GATE OF MILAN

MALPENSE, ITALY, SERVICE COMPETITION

88

89

EVENT/EXHIBITION STAIRCASE/ELEVATOR

GATEWAY

90

91

LEVEL 0

LEVEL +1

92

93

94

95

The project was born from the desire of the client to include a contemporary art gallery on the second and third floor of the hotel. The tunnel must be accessible from the outside, for this was placed a link with external escalators, based on a cornucopia that allows you to directly enter the second floor. The site chosen for the positioning of the escalator allows you to take advantage of the outdoor space for art exhibitions.

2009 WENJIN ART CENTRE

PECHINO, CHINA, EXHIBITION CONCEPT

VIDEO 96

97

GLASS COVER

ENTRANCE

STRUCTURE

BASE

98

99

LEVEL 0

WEST

100

LEVEL +1

SOUTH

101

102

103

The site of Stonehenge inspired the design of the stand. Arranged in a circle, as megaliths, are located in the surrounding environment, creating structures that act as exhibitors, area meetings, etc. In the middle of the totem is also an area dedicated to home automation, the heart of the company’s technological innovation.

2009 LIVINLUCE FAIR STAND MILAN, ITALY, EXHIBITION CONCEPT

104

105

DOMOTIC ZONE

LIGHTNING ZONE

ENERGY ZONE

106

107

SUB-STANDS

MAIN STAND

SERVING AREAS

WOOD HOLLOWCORE PANELS PVC COVERING SHELF

WOOD HOLLOWCORE PANELS

108

UPPER PLATE MDF PANEL

FRAME MDF PANEL MDF STRUCTURE WOOD HOLLOWLOWER PLATE PVC COVERING CORE PANELS

109

110

111

The space is located in an area of the former Delphinarium Riccione which contains an extreme interesting and particular value. The space of the project area has been interpreted as mainly directed towards the sea and towards the south. The side with main access have been identified as the side facing away towards Milan to the north. The shape of the building is developed from the theme of the bay. The proposal faces towards the bay to secure the best possible view from all the rooms and towards the sun. The building has a frontage to the sea front, which is partly flat but gradually recedes to favour exposure to the sun. The bay windows is placed in a regular pattern, sunning themselves, and turn at the diagonal and appear as diamonds set on the sloping surface of the building.

2009 DIAMOND HOTEL RICCIONE, ITALY, HOTEL INVITED COMPETITION

112

113

+9 ROOF TERASSE

+8

RESTAURANT FITNESS/SPA

+7 +6

70 ROOMS

+5

+4

+3

+2

+1 HALL/BAR

0

STORE (-1) CONFERENCE ROOM

-1

-2 -3

114

ROOMS

ROOF TERASSE

HALL/STORES

RESTAURANT

CONFERENCE ROOMS

FITNESS/SPA

PARKING

SUITES

115

LEVEL +6

LEVEL +7

LEVEL 0

EAST

116

LEVEL +8

WEST

117

118

119

120

121

The need to preserve a view with greater visibility from the road to commercial and accommodation resulted in the need to place the theatre in a position behind and therefore not visible from the street. However, to maintain a relationship between the theatre and the road was opened a crack in the front of the hotel building, which follows the main axis of the theatre behind. The frontage of the hotel opens likes a huge red curtain that introduces the transition from the urban scene of the city towards a fictional stage like a melodrama opera.

2010 CARTOON PARK OFFICE & OPERA 122

PECHINO, CHINA, MIX-USE INVITED COMPETITION

VIDEO 123

OPERA 3.500 MQ

124

OFFICE 80.200 MQ

HOTEL 45.000 MQ

125

126

LEVEL 0

LEVEL -1

NORTH

WEST

SOUTH

EAST

127

LEVEL -1

LEVEL +1

128

LEVEL 0

LEVEL +2

129

130

131

132

133

One of the requirements of the competition was to incorporate the Italian way of designing. This is included in the development as a specific place for specific business purposes in relation with the Italian design industry and culture. Therefore we decided to create a real connection from Siping Road in Fuxin Road, within the complex and using the concept of the Italian Gallery that is a covered pedestrian shopping street located between two buildings. There are fine examples of this type of chic shopping streets in Italy. The special atmosphere inside of this gallery is a pleasant mix of urban outdoor space and closed commercial space.

2011 SHANGHAI INTERNATIONAL DESIGN N1 134

SHANGHAI. CHINA, MIX-USE INVITED COMPETITION FIRST PRIZE

VIDEO 135

VITTORIO EMMANUELE GALLERY SCALA SQUARE DUOMO SQUARE

BIRD VIEW OF MILAN CENTRE

136

TONGJI CAMPUS

YANGPU DISTRICT

AXONOMETRIC OF SIDN1, SHANGHAI

137

CREATIVE COMMERCE 94.000 MQ

TOWER 1 TOWER 2 TOWER 3 TOWER 4

HOTEL

CITY LIFE 30.000 MQ

MEETING HALL

EDUCATION 30.000 MQ

SHOW SPACE DESIGN LIBRARY DESIGN MUSEUM

CREATIVE EXCHANGE 6.000 MQ

CITY LIFE LEVEL

138

EDUCATION AND MEETING LEVEL

CREATIVE COMMERCE (INDEPENDENT ENTRANCE)

139

LEVEL 0

140

LEVEL +5

LEVEL +2

NORTH

WEST

SOUTH

EAST

141

142

143

144

145

146

147

THE EXO-GRAM

EPISODE 2:

148 149

“ 150

If form doesn’t follow function anymore, what should we follow then?

Is everything allowed or should we find an internal rule?

The exogram is the essence of the project, its core and its main tool.”

151

EPISODE 2:

THE EXO-GRAM IDENTITY SHAPING IN ARCHITECTURE

We could draw real “signs” that reflects the particular elements of the project, a section, a criterion for dividing spaces and become constructed super signs.

“

What is meant by exo-gram is difficult to explain. I think like all things that pertain to creative activity as much as you try to describe them using words the more the idea becomes unclear. And the more intuition that guides the intellect while looking for a solution to the problem that is manipulating, rather than a crystal clear logical. But even after this fact, ex post, is an almost impossible temptation to explain, a self-made narrative, a story of events that finds its link.

I do not know if this is right or wrong, and maybe the categories of “right” and “wrong” are foreign to our reason. I would say that it is “truth”, the truth of a single work of art for which the data requirements, laid down the law that the artist “creates” at the time of the

152

If the code of architecture was no longer from within the function, it was necessary then to concentrate on the outside, the wrapping and semantically understand how it could evolve into a system that could be the subject of a new and innovative language, no longer combining words in a known language but by directly editing the grammar.”

vision of conception, and the first free search for the truth of the creative act begins. This was what Cezanne explained when he claimed that the artist must “see in their view” and when he added that “time and reflection... gradually alter the vision, and at the end we reach understanding”. That is the theory that comes after the practice and serves as the basis and starting point for a subsequent practice.

In fact, when universities were born, practices obviously existed and it is from those who began to speculate about the laws that governed the dynamics and find that in the laws you have one more tool for practicing new practices, through a process of interrelation and interdependence between theory and practice,

153

which is in fact necessary and vital for both.

Because professor and professional are two words that have the same etymological root: both “profess” adherence to the principles, mainly by teaching and practicing them to each other.

It is so that after producing a number of projects in 2008, we felt the need to define to theorize, to work on the rules of our doing in the sense of identifying the creative mechanisms and to study the operations. The intuition of Rem Koolhaas on bigness, that is, the loss of the relationship between the interior and exterior of a building when it exceeds a certain size, had really caused a cataclysm in the theoretical world of architecture. For nearly a century modernist dogma of the relationship between the exterior and interior of a building and consequently between its function and its form had indoctrinated the architects from around the world presenting their consciences authoring as a categorical imperative, almost a moral duty, the ethical principle of well design.

“Koolhaas has been, from this point of view, a new big bang!”

154

After the explosion, however, it came to finding new constellations, new systems that organize themselves, the thoughts and orientate the creative flow.

The desire for representation of architecture did not only focusing on its functionality, the internal organization and efficiency as a “building tool”, but it felt and still feel very strong symbolic value, iconic, universal, but at the same time and local identity. To be recognizable, to be stuck in the memory, to symbolize identity, not to be forgotten, were and still are the questions an architect want to answer with his own work. What we started to call “ cultural sustainability “ in architecture.

If the code of architecture was no longer from within the function, it was necessary then to concentrate on the outside, the wrapping and semantically understand how it could evolve into a system that could be the subject of a new and innovative language, not more combining words in a known language but by directly editing the grammar or at least attempting to do so.

In modern movement casing is grammatically have always been “plugging” in the sense of closing or opening (in the case of windows or balconies) interior spaces. The modern movement has decomposed, the “facade” of

classical deny was complete, replacing the classical orders and their strict compositional rules with no rules, no strict orders, not with the columns, no entablatures, etc. Not generating the language of “full and empty spaces” of planes and volumes, membranes and transparencies, which I really do not talk about.

Maybe the Chinese will feed it for the next fifty years reworking all the stages of our research in the seventies, eighties and nineties, but here in the west you always feel the need to explore new creative territories.

“To work on the casing but without falling into formalism or formaldehyde parallels of post-modern or post-deconstructionist and post-postiste.

What is needed is a new grammar of the enclosure.”

For modern architecture skeleton structure and function was just “hidden” in various

ways, open and closed at certain points in others, made transparent or opaque, projecting or recessed, in light or in shadow. All this sounded old and instead we had the perception of the housing from the creative point of view as a world in turmoil, all to revolutionize, to rethink and to reorganize.

“Skipping the connection with the inner casing can reorganize itself and evolve into a semantic system new, more structured and complex. Can evolve, for example in the relationship between a casing containing rigid and tense parts, including a kind of external skeleton, a shell and architectural scores in it and contained in between it. This possibility from the point of view of architecture reverses the relationship between interior and exterior, between function and form: the principle of architecture may not start to affect more from the outside, but on the contrary might just be the skeleton outside to “support” the overall architectural vision, from the outside to the inside. A sort of huge outer frame, an exo-frame architecture in which the gaps are “woven” of the elements supported, all the inverse of the old short modern conception”.

The subject was then to adjust the relationship between these two elements, these two natures exist in the casing so that this relationship became well-defined and identifiable

155

and that it was clearly possible to configure and draw this “exo”-matrix, not only had to have the above essential task of establishing the principle of identity, “a sign”, “meaning”, “icon”, memorable architecture, the soul and the meaning/significance of the building itself.

The consequence has been to imagine two substances that can be used freely in the organization of the enclosure: a course that remained in transparency of the glass, but that was not a closure but it was crossed by strong internal tensions, pulled at its ends by lines of force and contact with the exo-skeleton, and the other was supposed to be the bone substance and solid sign of the frame, as opposed to the opaque mass in tension just to differentiate it from the rest and become more linguistically.

With this distinction could draw real “signs” that reflected the particular elements of the project, a section, a criterion for dividing spaces and became constructed super signs, the mega-graphs of a particular essence of architecture, dynamically composed of tensions and forces detained tablets, real diagrams in the form of shell, exo-diagrams, exo-grams in fact, that resolved into a single symbolic gesture the entire requirement of architectural identity of the building.

In this way, the parts of the shell were also opaque and transparent, it could be realized with micro-perforated sheets, fabrics, textures that would guarantee linguistically the solid nature of the matter, to oppose the parties “held out” (not necessarily transparent or glass) it was this frame supported and sustained, and that left the surface the tension lines from which they were deeply crossed.

156

157

2006 ISOHYPSES LIBRARY 2007 MINITALY PARK & VILLAGE

EPISODE 2:

2007 BEZALEL CAMPUS

IDENTITY SHAPING IN ARCHITECTURE

THE EXO-GRAM

2008 “LE CORTI DI BAIRES” BUILDING 2008 ALZANO EXOGRAM HOUSING 2009 AXI LAB HOTEL 2009 MOBILE COMPANY HEADQUARTER 2011 EXOGRAM HOUSE 1 2012 GOSAN PUBLIC LIBRARY 2012 V-VALLEY SALES PAVILLION 2012 PLAM PLASTIC MUSEUM 158

159

2006 ISOHYPSES LIBRARY

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN, EDUCATION COMPETITION

160

Listening to the music of this place we saw silvered glass isohypses coming out from the hill moving windingly towards the street. Steady and silent like spaces for libraries should be. We desired to enter and live inside of them: we used them as shelter where we could read and study away from the rest of the world, suspended in the geological instant when these protrusions coming from the hill have been formed. But they are also moving imperceptibly, silently they change their shape as mountains and glaciers, the same way knowledge grows throughout the years. During the night they pulse of light, during the day they catch the sun warming and lighting the deep secrets of the knowledge they generously preserve.

161

EXO-GRAM

LEVEL +4 RESTAURANT 1600 MQ LEVEL +3 SUBJE CT AREA, OPEN MEDIA COLLECTIONS 3650 MQ MEDIA MANAGEMENT 425 MQ LEVEL +2 SUBJE CT AREA, OPEN MEDIA COLLECTIONS 3650 MQ MEDIA MANAGEMENT 425 MQ THE SWEDISH INSTITUTE OF CHILDREN BOOKS 640 MQ ADMINISTRATION AND STAFF 640 MQ VISIT ORIENTED ACTIVITIES 625 MQ LEVEL +1 SUBJE CT AREAS, OPEN MEDIA COLLECTIONS 3650 MQ CARETAKER’S OFFICE 360 MQ VISIT ORIENTED ACTIVITIES 625 MQ LEVEL 0 STUDIOS, TEACHINGROOMS, AUDITORIUM 900 MQ CHILDREN 1250 MQ CARETAKER’S OFFICE 180 MQ ADMINISTRATION AND STAFF 640 MQ MAIN ENTRANCE 530 MQ NEWS ZONE 300 MQ CAFE 308 MQ THE SWEDISH INSTITUTE OF CHILDREN BOOKS 640 MQ LEARNING ZONE 1900 MQ PUBLIC PASSAGE 630 MQ LEVEL -1 SORTING MASCHINE 450 MQ LOGISTIC CENTER 500 MQ DEPOSITORIES 1150 MQ ADMINISTRATION AND STAFF 640 MQ CHILDREN AND GARDEN 940 MQ TECHNICAL SPACE 2300 MQ THE SWEDISH INSTITUE OF CHILDREN BOOKS

162

163

LEVEL 0

LEVEL +1

NORTH

164

LEVEL +2

WEST

LEVEL +3

EAST

165

166

167

168

169

2007 MINITALY PARK & VILLAGE

This helicoid is the center of the plaza to the amusement park and along its development, it raises the ground that turns to artificial growing landscape. The architectural language playfully develop the theme of ‘Minitalia’. The ratio of scale is unpredictable and tricks the viewer and avoiding to reveal the true scale of the buildings. In elevation the rhythm of the side window is in fact twice the number of plans and the openings in the perforated sheets is even quadruple. The apparent elevation then doubles and quadruples: the real one hundred meter tower hotel then appears to be two hundred or even four hundred meters.

BERGAMO, ITALY, MIX-USE INVITED COMPETITION FIRST PRIZE

VIDEO 170

171

EXO-GRAM

172

173

HOTEL AND CONFERENCE LEVEL +24

GROUND LEVEL: HALL, RECEPTION, CLUB HOUSE, OUTDOOR SWIMMINGPOOL, CONFERENCE ROOM, EVENT PARK. LEVEL +1 TO +4: MEETING CENTER, OFFICE. LEVEL +5 TO +24: ROOMS, JU NIOR SUITE, SUITE, SKY SUITE. LEVEL 21: PANORAMIC PIANO BAR AND TARESSE.

SPA PAVILLION LEVEL +4

LEVEL +3

GALLERY LEVEL: PARFUMERY, SPA FARMACY, HAIRDRESSER, SOLARIUM, BIOLOGICAL MINIMARKET. PIANO +1 TO +5: SPA CENTER, FITNESS CENTER, FITNESS BAR, MASSAGGI, INDOOR SPA POOL.

KNOWLEDGE AND TECHNOLOGY PAVILLION

GALLERY LEVEL: LIBRARY, KIOSK, INTERNET CAFE, LITERARY MEETINGS. LEVEL -1: ELECTRONIC AND COMMUNICATION STORE.

ART AND CREATIVITY PAVILLION LEVEL +2

GALLERY LEVEL: ART GALLERY, AUCTION HOUSE. LEVEL -1: ARTISTIC AND CRAFTS WORKSHOP. LEVEL +1 TO +3: LOFT FOR ARTISTS.

FAMILY PAVILLION

GALLERY AND LOFT LEVEL: SLOW FOOD RESTAURANT, COOKING COURSES. LEVEL -1: MULTIFUNCTIONAL SPACE, EXHIBTION, PRODUCT PRESENTATIONS. LEVEL +1

SOCIALISATION PAVILLION

GALLERY LEVEL: COMMERCIAL SPACE LEVEL -1: DANCE SCHOOL, DAY AND EVENING COURSES FOR ALL AGES

HOLIDAY ANS TRAVEL PAVILLION

LEVEL 0

GALLERY LEVEL: COMMERCIAL SPACE AND SERVICES FOR HOLIDAY/TRAVEL, COMMERCIAL SPACE. LEVEL -1: COLLECTIONS AND SALE OF ETHNIC ITEMS FOR DECORATION, CULTURAL MEETING FROM THE ENTIRE WORLD, ART AS A THEME FOR TRAVEL.

SERVICE PAVILLION

GALLERY LEVEL: ATM, POST OFFICE, MEETING POINT, BABY PARKING, FIRST AID. LEVEL -1: ENTRANCE FOR INDOOR PARKING, AMBULANCE PARKING.

VILLAGE BY NIGHT

LEVEL -1

GALLERY LEVEL: MINITALIA ROCK CAFE, MUSIC AND PUB, VILLIAGE WINE BAR, INTERNET BRUNCH BAR. LEVEL -1: DANCE SCHOOL, DAY AND EVENING COURSES FOR ALL AGES

VISTA ITALIA, RESTAURANT AND BANQUETING SHOPPING, GADGETS AND SERVICE TICKET SALE AND PARK ENTRANCE

174

175

FACADE SKIN AIR OUTPUT

FACADE STRUCTURE

CORE STRUCTURE

AIR INPUT

176

177

LEVEL +1

LEVEL +2

LEVEL -1

178

NORTH

LEVEL +3

EAST

179

CLOSING GRID CALENDERED COATED SUPPORTING STRUCTURE

CLOSING GRID CALENDERED COATED SUPPORTING STRUCTURE

LIGHTWEIGHT REINFORCED CONCRETE SOLUTION

ANCHOR BRACKET OF WARPING FACADE WITH VERTICAL SLABS

LIGHTWEIGHT REINFORCED CONCRETE SOLUTION

ANCHOR BRACKET OF WARPING FACADE WITH VERTICAL SLABS

FLOOR FLOOR HEATING

FLOOR SPACE SYSTEM HOLLOW CORE SLAB BEAMS SYSTEM FLOOR HEATING SPACE SYSTEM HOLLOW CORE SLAB HOLLOW CORE SLAB BEAMS SYSTEM PLASTER HOLLOW CORE SLAB PLASTER DROPPED CEILING IN PLASTIC ELEMENTS DROPPED CEILING IN PLASTIC ELEMENTS INDIRECT LIGHTNING

GLASS

GLASS

GLASS

INDIRECT LIGHTNING

DOUBLE GLAZED FIXED-TO-CEILING WINDOW

DOUBLE GLAZED FIXED-TO-CEILING WINDOW

GLASS

CLADDING PANELS IN ALUMINIUM CLADDING PANELS IN ALUMINIUM

STIFFENING U-PROFILE STRUCTURE OPENINGS IN THE ALU-PANELS.

STIFFENING U-PROFILE STRUCTURE OPENINGS IN THE ALU-PANELS.

solution

180

solution

181

182

183

2007 BEZALEL CAMPUS

A monument of Jerusalem, a huge base, an impending silent presence, a shining metal and glass cover. An abstract and constant surface below which light penetrates, illuminating creative thoughts and entering the creativity subconscious. We called it archeological because it’s a square developed on a steep slope: it connects the cathedral level with the Russian Mission Building level. It sections the school in its parts, so as they come out as crystal jewels: the studios, the library, the canteen, the coffee bar and the shop for students work. The result is a building introvert as an artist, a precious tough skin with bright beams that perceive a soul revealing itself full of light, fantasy and astonishing shapes.

JERUSALEM, ISRAEL, EDUCATION COMPETITION

184

185

EXO-GRAM

186

ARCHITECTURE

INDUSTRIAL DESIGN (B.A.)

ARCHITECTURE AND URBAN DESIGN

INDUSTRIAL DESIGN (M.DES.)

SCREEN BASED ARTS

CINEMA

CERAMIC AND GLASS DESIGN

PHOTOGRAPHY

JE WELRY AND FASHION

FINE ARTS

HISTORY AND THEORY

FINE ARTS M.F.A.

VISUAL COMMUNICATIONS

COMPUTER LAB.

187

188

LEVEL 0

LEVEL -0,5

LEVEL -1

LEVEL -2

LEVEL -3

LEVEL -4

NORTH

WEST

EAST

SOUTH

189

190

191

192

193

194

195

2008 ‘LE CORTI DI BAIRES’ BUILDING

The architecture of the building is inspired by the traditional milanese architecture between the war until the fifties, namely the transformation tha took place from city to city with the contemporary architecture of Terragni, Cattaneo, Lingeri, Muzio and Fiocchi. It was characterized by the rational elements of pillar structures arranged with white beams in an orthogonal mesh, mixing up noucentistes stylized classic elements like arches, arcades and public colonnades. The project plans to cut diagonally the urban block forming a public commercial gallery which connects a secondary street with the main streets of the block.

MILAN, ITALY, HOUSING INVITED COMPETITION

VIDEO 196

197

EXO-GRAM

198

199

GALLERY ROOF (GRID STRUCTURE)

PRIMARY BUILDING FACADE (INTERNAL)

SECONDARY BUILDING OUTER FACADE (INTERNAL)

PRIMARY BUILDING FACADE (EXTERNAL)

SECONDARY BUILDING FACADE (EXTERNAL)

PRIMARY BUILDING VOLUMES

GLASS ROOFING BASED ON TRIANGULAR STRUCTURE DUPLEX SIMPLEX SECONDARY BUILDING INNER FACADE (INTERNAL) MULTIPLEX

SECONDARY BUILDING VOLUMES

200

201

LEVEL 1

LEVEL 0

LEVEL 3

LEVEL 2

LEVEL 4

LEVEL 7

LEVEL 9

LEVEL 11

LEVEL 6

LEVEL 13

LEVEL 14

SOUTH EAST

202

203

204

205

206

207

208

209

The apartment complex is located within a park of conifers on one site with a strong gradient and bounded upstream and downstream from ditches. In the two buildings, different solutions are obtained for various housing sizes, developed at one level or duplex. The longitudinal facades have been treated with a kind of staggered hole used to house windows or balconies.

2008 ALZANO EXOGRAM HOUSING BERGAMO, ITALY, HOUSING CONCEPT

210

211

EXO-GRAM

212

213

LEVEL 0

LEVEL +1

214

215

NORTH

SOUTH

WEST

EAST

216

217

218

219

220

221

It is the iconic and dynamic relationship with the road that has made us suggested the shape of the tower. A sort of big band stuck in the ground surrounding the axis of Rivoltana. The effect could be made more efficient by installing a sign on the south side to simulate the leak of the tape on the opposite side of the road.

The effect will be further accentuated if the road were to be raised in this section.

The entire construction is developed behind this graphic that in its simplicity will be a symbol of iconic value. An architectural sign, a huge directional display that dynamically goes back to the horizontal line of the land from which it rises.

2009 AXI-LAB HOTEL

RODANO, ITALY, HOTEL INVITED COMPETITION

VIDEO 222

223

EXO-GRAM

224

225

AMFI THEATER

SOUTH

226

CENTRAL SPA RESIDENCE HOTEL RESIDENCE RESIDENCE

WEST

227

LEVEL +1

Frame from Sergej Ejze nst ejn’s movi e “Oct ober the day that sh ook the world”.

LEVEL +2

228

LEVEL 0

LEVEL +1

LEVEL +2

LEVEL +3

229

230

231

232

233

234

235

Two individual building volumes create the entrance in their void as a continuation of the flow from a nearby building. The project captures enclosure, but, through the material, it is actually transparent from within.

The facade is inspired by the cultural chinese tradition of paper-folding, origami. This gives a expressive and diverse facade articulated thorugh a triangular pattern.

2009 MOBILE COMPANY HEADQUARTER SHENZEN. CHINA, OFFICE COMPETITION

VIDEO 236

237

EXO-GRAM

238

239

LEVELS FIRM LEADERS (OFFICE) 8.000 SQ

STAFF FAMILY HOUSE

(RESTAURANT)

GLASS PANELS

7.000 SQ

STRUCTURAL CORE COLOUMS DEPARTMENT (OFFICE) 42.000 SQ

CLIENT SERVICE 1.800 SQ

ATRIUM GLASS PANELS

CATWALKS

ACCESORIAL OFFICE 2.000 SQ NEW TECHNOLOGY

(SHOWROOM)

5.000 SQ

MEETING AREA 42.000 SQ SHOPPING SPACE (LOBBY) 7.800 SQ

240

241

LEVEL 0

F

F E

E D

D C

C B

B A 1

2

3

4

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

5

6

7

8

9

A

LEVEL +12

F

F E

E D

D C

C B

B A 1

242

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

5

6

7

8

9

243

LEVEL +26

A 1

2

3

4

NORTH

244

EAST

SOUTH

WEST

245

246

247

248

249

250

251

The project is part of a highly attractive natural environment inside the foothills of Torre Drone, Ranica and Alzano Lombardo. The building consists of two volumes with irregular plans, connected to each other only on one side. The two bodies are open to the south, creating a visual telescope, characterized by large windows that are overlooking the landscape. The external floors are laid in gravel roads for vehicular and pedestrian paving blocks. This is to achieve a maximum mitigation with the natural environment.

2011 EXOGRAM HOUSE 1 ALZANO, ITALY, HOUSING CONCEPT

252

253

EXO-GRAM

254

255

CEILING AND EXTERNAL WALLS 28%

ELEVATIONS AND GROUND FLOOR 3%

SOIL GROUND FLOOR 17%

FROUNDATION AND INTERNAL ELEVATIONS 44%

EXCAVATIONS 8%

256

257

EAST

LEVEL -1

258

NORTH

LEVEL 0

259

RAISED TOP ELEMENT WATER COLLECTON GALES ADJUSTABLE OUTER METAL BRACKET CONTINUOUS STEEL LINTELS

EXTERNAL CLADING PANELS 6-8 MM FIXATING LAYER 3 MM CORRUGATED SHEET 55 MM PRIMARY METAL FRAMWORK SECONDARY METAL FRAMEWORK AQUAPANEL PLATES 2 X 15 MM EXTERIOR FINISH, PLASTER

RAISED INTERNAL TOP ELEMENT GUTTER RAISED EXTERNAL TOP ELEMENT EXTERNAL CLADDING 6-8 MM FIXATING LAYER 3 MM

EXTERNAL CLADDING 6-8 MM FIXATING LAYER 3 MM CORRUGATED SHEET 55 MM INSULATING LAYER OF POLYURETHANE FOAM 2 X 7 CM VAPOR BARRIER 1 MM CONCRETE BLOCK 25 CM INTERIOR FINISH DOUBLE PLASTERBOARD PANEL 2 X 1.25 CM MINERAL WOOL INSULATION PANEL 4CM SUBSTRUCTURE PLASTERBOARD WALL 5 CM BEARING WALLS 20 CM EXTRUDED POLYSTYRENE INSULATION PANEL 10 CM EXTERIOR PLASTER REINFORCED WITH GLASS FIBER MESH 1 CM FLOOR FINISHING 8 MM FIXATING LAYER 2 MM SCREEDLOAD DISTRIBUTION 6 CM RADIANT PANEL 3 CM ACOUSTIC MAT 8 MM LIGHTWEIGHT CONCRETE SCREED PLANTS 10 CM

EXTERNAL CLADDING 6-8 MM

SOLID CEILING 18 CM

FIXATING LAYER 3 MM VENTILATED WALL SUB-STRUCTURE EXTRUDED POLYSTYRENE INSULATION PANEL 10 CM SOLID WALL 20 CM CONCRETE BLOCK 25 CM MINERAL WOOL INSULATION PANEL 4CM DOUBLE PLASTERBOARD PANEL 2 X 1.25 CM

FLOOR FINISHING 8 MM FIXATING LAYER 2 MM SCREEDLOAD DISTRIBUTION 6 CM RADIANT PANEL 3 CM THERMAL INSULATION 4 CM LIGHTWEIGHT CONCRETE SCREED PLANTS 10 CM

LEVELING LAYER OF CONCRETE 10 CM WATERPROOFING 2 X 4 MM FOUNDATION SLAB 40 CM

FOUNDATION SLAB 40 CM

WATERPROOFING 2 X 4 MM LAVELING LAYER OF CONCRETE 10 CM

WATERPROOFING 2 X 4 MM LEVELING LAYER OF CONCRETE 10 CM

260

CONCRETE SIDEWALK BACKFILL

CRAWL SPACE AREA WITH PREFORMED PLASTIC ELEMENTS

261

262

263

264

265

The library is a playful urban object liftet above the ground level. This lift is designed to increase the light that enters the space of the library, to open a large visual connection and to minimize the impact of the new building. The architecture is composed of a structural shell in white concrete, reinforced glass that surrounds the two volumes of collections and multi-purpose areas. The access level is +7,00 and is connected with the road thanks to a double escalator that connects the north-east side of the site with the heart of the library.

2012 GOSAN PUBLIC LIBRARY 266

DAEGO, SOUTH COREA, EDUCATION COMPETITION

267

EXO-GRAM

GENERAL COLLECTION

HUMANITY, SOCIETY, ART AND SCIENCE

DIGITAL DATA CORNER ADMINISTRATION ELDERLY AND LOCAL GENERAL COLLECTION TOILET FACILITIES LINGUISTIC AND LITERATURE CLASS AND SEMINAR ROOMS CHILDREN AND STORYTELLING TOILET FACILITIES READING ROOM MULTI PURPOSE ROOM

MASCHINE AND ELECTRICS PRESERVATION ROOM DRESSING ROOM GARAGE

268

269

LEVEL +1

270

LEVEL 0

LEVEL +3

LEVEL +2

LEVEL +4

271

MULTIPURPOSE ROOM

NORTH

WEST

272

EAST

SOUTH

273

274

275

276

277

278

279

V-Valley Pavillon is located in Guangzhou, close to the GDPE site along the Pearl River. The pavilion will be used to expose the presentation materials concerning the redevelopment of the area. This building will contain offices that are involved in selling real estate in the area. The project is at the center of the masterplan and will later serve a restaurant.

2012 V-VALLEY SALES PAVILLION 280

CANTON, CHINA, EXHIBITION INVITED COMPETITION

281

EXO-GRAM

282

283

PROGRAMMING AS A PAVILLION AND AS A RESTAURANT.

284

285

LEVEL 0

LEVEL +1

286

LEVEL +2

LEVEL +3

287

The Plastic Museum of Guangzhou is a point of reference for the culture of plastics in the world.

The project is built around the concept of a spiral ramp that becomes exhibition and connection between the different environments. The building consists of four pavilions connected by a spiral exhibition that houses several spaces dedicated to the world of plastic. It links the history of plastic with educational areas in both plastic properties and plastic design. The building, which is close to the GDPE Landmark Building, is designed to meet high standards of environmental quality and comfort thanks to a careful study in integration of plastics in the production of building elements.

2012 PLAM PLASTIC MUSEUM 288

GUANGZHOU, CHINA, CULTURAL CONCEPT

289

EXO-GRAM

290

291

292

293

LEVEL 0

LEVEL +1

LEVEL +3

LEVEL +2

SOUTH

294

295

296

297

298

299

DENSITY AND IDENTITY

EPISODE 3:

300 301

“ 302

The financial capitalism and communist capitalism will end by the emerging of web distributist economy. This will change our cities, fill the empty space and free wasted land for urban agriculture.�

303

EPISODE 3:

DENSITY AND IDENTITY SHALL WE DENSE THE CITY?

We must forget the alienation of the suburbs rarefied to recover the DNA of the dense city, with it a unique opportunity for a new urban identity.

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The greatest modern architects, such as Le Corbusier, were absolutely convinced that the only possible fate for the European historical city centres was demolishing.

This sentence may seem absurd but if you judge the tree by its fruits and take a look at the suburbs of our cities, which are the only true product of planning from the twentieth century, called “urban science”, we cannot confirm that the urbanism killed the town.

But what does “urban science” mean? Imaging two mental images: the historical centre of any of our European cities and any part of their peripheries. It is clear that there are major differences in the way these two parts of the city have been planned. In city centres have evolved and changed for almost twenty cen-

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The attempt to respond to the question about the relationship between density and urban identity, instead it leads us to a different approach to the historic town, which is non-prenostalgic, looks forward and goes in the direction of a better future for the city. It is a sort of new Renaissance, ‘back to the old way‘, when classical Greek and Roman art was the main engine of renewal and experimentation among the artists and the architects of the time.”

turies. The buildings and interventions were based on an idea of common substantially and a homogeneous city.

The theoretical thinking which underlies the construction of the suburbs is precisely the modern urbanism, which has its consolidation phase between the twenties and thirties of the last century and have contributed to various of participants, scholars, architects and urban planners.

There is no doubt that our suburbs are a place where no one, given the choice, would want to live, while the European city centers, in contrast, remain on top of the list for most of the people on this planet. This infers that the periphery, or the modern city, has something

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ries and full of extraordinary works of art and monuments as well as natural beautiful streets and houses. In the mind of Le Corbusier a mesh of “fast” roads that would have divided the area into twenty regular blocks, like a chessboard, with a centre of which would raise 18 similar skyscrapers should replace this. The skyscrapers were imagined to be produced industrially in series, which would ensure sanitary condition “standards” to all of the inhabitants, in a completely undifferentiated and approved manner. The concept of standards and rules was therefore another element that approach the theoretical basis of which we can now see perfectly applied in the buildings of our suburbs; Similar homes of boxes, impersonal and anonymous. This is in fact the result of thinking about urban planning in terms of “standard.

that does not work and therefore the theories that led to its construction (the modern town planning) has in its assumptions something deeply wrong.

“The intentions and objectives that architects of the modern movement were asking, were positive and acceptable, and came from the socialist and social setting of the urban problem; a home for everyone, even for the less fortunate.”

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The problem was dealt with scientifically, were defined by objective criteria to ensure the quality and number of minimum performance of homes and the city (Klein Existent Minimum).

They tried defining criteria as objective as possible and it was assumed that the numerical parameters were the best way to ensure this quality. They were born at that moment where planning rules were introduced as we know them today: land index, coverage ratio, minimum distances, ratio of lighting, etc.

They were invented relations, indexes and numbers, and when applied in planning automatically would ensure the quality of life in the city of the future. Another belief is absolutely common and cross-cutting in the thinking of the fathers of modern urban planning. The city has been built in the previous centuries by the Roman civilizations. Its build in a compact way and made continuous, and in their opinion it was difficult if not impossible to guarantee those numerical and scientific parameters of quality and health care that they had determined to be the only true guarantee of quality living. It seems incredible, but in those years the greatest, advanced, cultural and avant-garde architects of the world were absolutely convinced that the only possible fate for the historic centres of the European capitals were demolishing. The most obvious and amazing example is the Plan Voisin for Paris by Le Corbusier.

Le Corbusier drew this plan in 1925, not as a joke or for fun, but as a concrete proposal and according to him, not only unworkable, but also convenient and appropriate. The plan called for the demolition of a quadrilateral of a mile and a half to nine hundred meters (about 1,400,000 square meters) of the centre of Paris. An area that extends from the Louvre museum, which thankfully was not planned demolition, to the Place de Ville. That includes all the district of Saint Denis, Les Halles, the Seine River in the south to the whole Sebastopole Boulevard to the north. All of these beautiful parts of city, built though the centu-

Next to the concept of standards, which also belong to the modern city is zoning. Starting from the criticism of the historic city, which had always been composed by a great mix of features; residential, commercial and production, planners imagined that it would be easier, healthier and more scientifically correct to divide the city into functional zones, the so-called zoning. It is no coincidence that recently, we use terms such as residential area, commercial area and industrial area to describe our suburbs. Is there a relationship between the density of the urban fabric and identity of towns and villages contexts? And if there is, what are the factors that determine the conditions for the identity values that effectively can permeate a part of the city or neighbourhood?

This is the first question we might instinctively ask ourselves by comparing the image of the suburbs; rarefied, contemporary and impersonal, with the historical centres; compact, full of identity and architectural values, in order to build a strong urban identity. However, this comparison can cause the mistake of promoting an impossible revival of past experiences, an unnecessary and anachronistic attempt to revive nostalgically of the picturesque squares, in a romantic and non-real reconstruction, however, unable to reproduce the social-cultural structures and urban contexts. The result of those who, at the time, made them alive was considered current, innovative and cutting edge.

By only reading the “morphology” of the historic city to identify a posterior, or the “rules” of composition and size ratios, to reproduce it in the present. That is the mistake Camilo Sitte made in his “ The art of building the city “ in 1889 while the modernist architectural theories began to evolve and started to question

the foundations of the historic city. He drew his theories as a reaction the theoretical dissolution of the historic city.

The error was that Sitte reduced the city to its physical and morphological aspects, and to identify its “rules”, which limited him only to “observe” the shape of the city as if it was freezed into patterns and laws. This was done completely without investigating the causes that had led the anthropological and social structure of the historical city, as we know it.

“So you can say that the text of Sitte, instead of reviving the historic city, it states forcefully the end, since it tends to observe its purely formal structure, proving an inadvertently anachronism and detachment from social and economic reality in his own time.”

The attempt to respond to the question about the relationship between density and urban identity, instead it leads us to a different approach to the historic town, which is nonprenostalgic, looks forward and goes in the direction of a better future for the city. It is a sort of new Renaissance, “back to the old way “, when classical Greek and Roman art was the main engine of renewal and experimentation among the artists and the architects of the time. In contrast to the “modern barbaric way”, going against the Gothic, the architecture of the “Goths”, or barbarians. Then returning to the classical it was not only in the formal language but also a reference against it, which the different sensitivity that Christian art had developed over the centuries that distanced it from classicism. This fact was not denied. It is impossible to imagine the lightness, elegance and structural clarity of space

by Brunelleschi, without thinking about the linguistic construction of Gothic architecture, which was refused in its formal, but was deeply absorbed in the sensibility of artists and architects of the time.

This is not denying everything that is related to urban planning and architecture of the twentieth century, but rather to understand

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the structural reasons, social and anthropological, as identified through the built environment of the historic city.

“One needs to recover this to imagine an urban revolution that will once again create a strong identity in urban areas but remain totally contemporary, openly stating its belonging in the twentyfirst century.”

Initially we could define the possibility that an individual has to recognize the image perceived in the city and be able to identify intuitively and without mediation the organizational structure of the built environment and be able to relate through a system of natural and reassuring physical and spatial references.

Saverio Muratori already had read the built developments in the city as the evolution of civilization in its relation to social and economic systems that solidify in roads, buildings and urban systems.

Masons accused the modern movement for not grasping this principle of evolution of the city and loudly denounced the heavy responsibility. If we consider the history of the built environment of a city, we can interpret it consistently, until the nineteenth century, as the evolution of a changing organism. The mutations of the organism are always absorbed and become part of the urban perception. In a sense, the interventions are linguistically very different from each other, however these interventions seem to contribute to the design and unified image of the city.

All these interventions are evolving the urban organism without altering the generative principle; we could say the urban DNA is causing evolutionary mutations. In contrast, with modern town planning this DNA does not evolve anymore, but it is a plugged-in synthetic gene, different, that somehow it is denial. This is the main indictment that Saverio Muratori ascribes to the modern movement. But we must not fall into a common misconception that the language of architecture and urban planning are one.

Instead, one must clearly distinguish the two fields avoiding the mistake of transferring the

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disappointment and frustration generated on a level on the other. In other words, the negative and alienating atmosphere of urban peripheries must not become an argument to condemn modern architecture, or vice versa; enthusiasm for new futuristic buildings should not lead to defend the modern town planning and the new suburbs unconditionally. In summary, one must understand that modern architecture is not uniquely identifiable with the modern town planning.

The demonstration that these two fields are and must remain distinct is the fact that modern and contemporary architectural interventions often fit perfectly into the fabric of the historic city. When the linguistic aspect is used in accepting the principle of generative tissue, the DNA of the historic city, the intervention not only holds up, but also able to absorb the totality of the urban organism. A case of positive integration is that of the municipality of Murcia Rafael Moneo. It’s an episode of exemplary successful meeting between contemporary architectural language and urban DNA of the historic city. In fact this example shows that if the contemporary architectural language accepts the generative principle of the city can contribute dramatically to the quality and identity of the urban context.

The discourse on the urban plan is instead completely different. When used in the Moneo Murcia town planning the context is already defined; it is the dense fabric of the historic city. The building plays it without questioning it, accept it and identifies the areas of expression without absolutely fall into the “replica”, but absolutely affirming their relationship.

These assumptions take us back to the starting point and lead us to question the generative principle of the historic city. We will limit ourselves here to outline the theoretical insights on which to criticize the current situation and draw the possible avenues of research and study. Ersilia is one of the city explained by Italo Calvino in his “Invisible Cities“. Here, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of buildings where people live who have relationships between them: friends, clients and relatives. Periodically, the city is disassembled and the citizens move elsewhere, leaving behind, as the only trace of their being, a grid of wires that represent friendship, love and relationships that have been lived in that city. This quote gives us an opportunity to distinguish one type of approach with respect to the urban reality.

If, as we have seen, you can see the city as the physical construct of social relations and, in this case, land use and its relationship to

properties with respect the individual and the community. It is clear that if we read the morphological aspects correctly, such as urban consequences of these relationships and find the deep roots of the identifying characteristics of the historical city, we have to question the nature of these relationships and their evolution over time. There are many studies about how the “urban science” has developed, especially in Italy, the evolution of the historic city and all come to the conclusion that a constant decisive of the construction of the city is evidently in the relationship between private space and public space.

We might also add that the boundary between the physical realm and the private physical realm, in all its different shades, coincides with the shape of the historic city. It has its own generative change in the frontal, the contact between these different types of space, with the aim of avoiding most possible confusion or misunderstandings on the bond appurtenance of each portion of the urban space. In other words, every single square meter of the historic city is usefully used and is clearly defined in its terms of ownership (public, semipublic, private or semi-private) management and use.

“The historic city tends to economize and optimize the use of the soil and space, through the physical contiguity within the areas of management. The urban structure is so dense that it follows the definition of necessity.”

One can therefore say that this character derives from an anthropological concept that defines the identity of the individual in relation to society and the more and more parallel emergence of the evolution of our civilization, called the change of form and urban structure, increasing the identity and clarity.

The relationship between the spaces is closely linked to the evolution of society and, above all, the evolution and to specify the roles and linkages that develop in the community. It is no coincidence that the modern urban planners was born with the socialists in

the nineteenth century, which , in accordance with the intuition of Karl Marx, did precede urban planning idea of a deep social reform that affected the proper relationship between the individual and the community. Karl Marx correctly guesses that urban planning is not only a consequence of the relations of production and the relations between what he calls social “classes”. It is precisely for this reason that it is dedicated specifically to urban planning, but focuses on his ideas of social engineering and aiming to subvert the balance right with particular reference to the sphere of relations between the private and the public at various levels. He trusts that then automatically this “new society” would also have produced a new kind of city and that is exactly what then occurred in cities of the twentieth century.

Returning to the principle of contact and physical continuity between the different spaces of the dense city, ranked according to different degrees of relevance between individual and collective, we find that in all the experiments that the modern town planning and its continuity is interrupted; the different appliances are disarticulated and removed from each other, rarefied and diluted. This is resulting in a sort of limbo urban and is excused on “health science” because it allows one to bring light and air to the rooms, but that is in logic of the relationship between public space and private space, a real historical rupture, destroying the building curtain and turning all the buildings into individual objects.

If we approach the issue on an anthropological level we could say that the concept of collective space is no longer in direct physical contact with the individual and therefore it is no longer defined physically. While the physical contact, in fact created an identity of substance between the individual and the community as a set of the individuals, we move to a form of segregation of the individual, by introducing a field of physics and even political mediation between the individual and the community. It follows that the latter tends to assume or acquire its own independent identity, and therefore inherently authoritarian because it no longer directly identifiable with the individual but is distinctive and superior to them.

The inevitable physical consequence is the total loss of identity of the urban context, namely the loss of the ability of the individual to “recognize” the collective space, because it no longer contributes to give life and form.

While in the city the dense and continuous contact between the various appliances define private/public space and at the same time, without mediation, shape the identity of

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collective space. In the new city the rarefied public space lose this contact and with it also loses its very essence.

The consequences can be two: the first is the loss of any identity value of the public space, which basically becomes an anti-location; a place with no possibility of the shape. The second is the buffering of this lack of identity with a public image surrogate, hierarchically superior to the scale of individuals, which refers to a social organization that is required to fully define and only the identity of the collective space. In this way the morphology of the public space and even itself was identified in the competition of individual buildings. In this context, the identity is inherent in the same way as the construction of the dense city.

If this is defined, in its overall image, constructed by the physicality of the individual appliances, its structure, its systems and its representative references are immediately intelligible to the perception of the individual that naturally recognize and enters into a relationship with the space of the city. It then establishes a causal relationship between density, land use, appliances adjacencies between public and private, and the resulting opportunity for the individual is to enter into relations with the physical space of the city, thus attributing to its identity.

This process belonged to the DNA of the historical city but has disappeared from the DNA of the modern city (suburbs). However, the evolution in this sense, within the nature of the city, has been somewhat of a social experiment imposed in an authoritarian manner by the convergence of several components also apparently opposed to each other. On the one hand the experimental application of the theories and the socialist ideology, from other perspective could be interesting.

“If this new urban theory was applied to agricultural areas outside the historical city, it could be a tremendous opportunity to increase the land value.”

It is no a coincidence that in shaping and implementing of extensive new theories have been totalitarian in a political and social

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contexts. Even in opposing orientations and the same modern theorists of new urbanism came in fact from cultural fields and then theorized by the higher authorities of the state, in different forms of expression of totalitarianism but both nationalist proletarian.

The discomfort, alienation, anxiety and any other symptom linked to modernity and its expression built in suburban areas refer in fact to a desire for change, not a longing for the “idyllic picture” of the past but how to built a physical form that corresponds to what each individual has within himself or herself.

“The density is a trend that can be observed in nature in all life forms, both plant and animal, is a natural principle that, even for humans, has been confirmed in the birth and growth of urban centres and cities.”

It has then been enriched over the centuries by other content that obviously belong to a sphere higher than the natural value from the sphere of relations between human beings.

These systems have therefore found application in the form and context constructed by updating the centuries the dense plant with initial overlapping transport systems but also of architectural representation of the civic values of the relationship: the street, the square, the temple, the church, the market, the institutions, the mansions, the banks, the museums and etc.

The natural tendency was countered from the artificial density of urban social and political experiments of the twentieth century, but today this process has reached an inflection point. The idea of cultural innovation as a “rupture” and break with the past is now outdated because everything has already been “broken” and the historic town dissolved. This would be instead of starting from the consideration of the desire for a dense city and therefore identity, such as a natural trend in the perception that humans have their own built environment.

The anxiety is so strong, discomfort so obvious as to why the birth of true density surrogates and identity: the malls, the outlets, the artificial thickening towards which thousands and thousands of people, even at the cost of crossing dozens if not hundreds of miles of a thin suburb without identity, are the perverse symptom of this irrepressible tendency toward density.

The “urban science” should take note of these symptoms and operate a total reversal of the trend of modern urban settings, abandoning the “broken” and the abstractions of numbers, social experiments and planning to return to nature of human aggregations. In fact, we must forget the alienation of the suburbs rarefied to recover the DNA of the dense city, with it a unique opportunity for a new urban identity.

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2007 HKWF HONG KONG WATERFRONT

2008 NANHE ECODENSITY TOWN 2010 FASHION CITY

2013 KINGSBORN SPORT PARK VILLAGE & RESORT

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EPISODE 3:

DENSITY AND IDENTITY SHALL WE DENSE THE CITY?

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2007 HKWF HONG KONG WATERFRONT

HONG KONG, CHINA, MIX-USE CONCEPT

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The proposal aims to give to pedestrians an unusual view of the water front, from the water itself.

This is obtained creating an architectural lagoon trough a floating pedestrian connection between the east and west extremes of the coastline. The architectural lagoon allows the commercial path to became a commercial and panoramic loop alternating a “Venice featured� walk by the sea to enjoy the central waterfront reflecting in the water just like a real life postcard.

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TOWERS

FETTUCCINE CONNECTIONS

“WALK BY THE SEA” AND “WALK ON THE SEA”

COMMERCIAL AND PANORAMIC LOOP

JA RDINES

COMMERCIAL

PEDESTRIAN CONNECTION OPEN SPACE

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2008 NANHE ECODENSITY TOWN NANHE, CHINA, MIX-USE INVITED COMPETITION FIRST PRIZE

The project draws inspiration from the city’s urban studies that Leonardo da Vinci created for Milan in the late fifteenth century, and the urban structure of the Forbidden City in Beijin. By using the necessary technologies and inetegrate sustainable solutions the new city will become a real Eco-Town. The blocks are designed as large courtyards where buildings are arranged along the edges while the center forms an internal area of green and services. This criterion is based on the principle of urban organization that governs the structure of the Forbidden City in Beijing, also divided into zones which are arranged to the sides of the monumental central system, each dominated by a building for reference.

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SECONDARY SCHOOL MESEUM CITY HALL, ADMINISTRATION, POLICE HOTEL, ETC. STADIUM, SPORTS CENTER AMUSEMENT CENTER SCIENCE PARK FRUIT AND VEGETABLE MARKET HOSPITAL PRIMARY SCHOOL ARTS CENTRE AGENCY NEIGHBORHOOD LEISURE CENTRE CINEMA, THEATER SUPERMARKET, MEDIACENTER GROUP PRACTICE CIVIC BLOCK SPACE FOR INDOOR SPACE PHARMACY SHOPS, OFFICE RESIDENTIAL HOUSING KINDERGARDEN, ELDERHOMES BLOCK EVENT SPACE THE FORBIDDEN CITY, BEIJI NG, AND ECO-TOWN, NANHE.

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DISTRICT LEVEL FUNCTION

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SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH CENTER

AMUSEMENT DISTRICT

STADIUM

DISTRICT MAIN BUILDING

SCIENCE PARK AND HOSPITAL

MAIN BUILDING OF AMERICAN DISTRICT HANZI TOWER

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PRIMARY ROAD

PRIMARY ROADS

PUBLIC TRANSIT AXIS

TRANSVERS ACCESS

MAIN CROSSING ROADS

SECONDARY ROADS

PUBLIC TRANSPORT AXIS

LONGITUDINAL ACCESS

LOCAL ROADS

EXTERNAL FLOWS ACCESS

BUS STOPS

URBAN NOTES

LOCAL ROAD SECTION

SECONDARY ROAD SECTION ON BRIDGES

SECONDARY ROAS SECTION

PRIMARY ROAD SECTION

MAIN PRIMARY ROAD SECTION

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CIVIC BLOCK CENTER SPACE FOR INDOOR SPACE PHARMACY SHOPS, OFFICE RESEDENTIAL HOUSING

KINDERGARDEN AND ELDERHOME

BLOCK EVENT SPACE DISTRICT LEVEL FUNCTION

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2010 FASHION CITY

The concept for the masterplan of the Fashion District in Beijing is inspired by the valley of Shangri-La in Yunnan Province, on the border with Tibet. This is one of China’s most beautiful places in terms of scenic and most visited and it is characterized by mountains that descend to the sea. In the project, inspired by these forms, nature is reflected into architecture. Other sources of inspiration of the concept are the terraced grounds, the folds of tissue and the galleries in the shopping areas, located inside the buildings. Brands, a distinctive feature of Italian fashion, form a kind of skin that covers the architecture.

PECHINO, CHINA, COMMERCIAL CONCEPT

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FASHION TOWER

FASHION TOWER

GREEN ROOF STRUCTURES

COMMERCIAL PARK AREA

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The master plan defines an area of about 250,000 square meters 10 km south of the urban area of Guilin, consisting of a commercial village, sports facilities, and a four-star hotel with 200 rooms. The idea is to imagine a village in growth surrounding the static hotel building, like the bamboo forest surrounds the mountains that characterize the area. The village is in fact made up of one large coverage, which covers trade pavilions arranged in a pattern that mimics the matrix of the existing village to the north.The hotel is the symbolic landmark of the entire complex.

2013 KINGSBORN SPORT PARK VILLAGE & RESORT GUILIN, CHINA, MIX-USE CONCEPT

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FOOTBALL FIELDS

WEST GATE ENTRANCE BADMINTON COURTS

TENNIS COURTS SHOWROOM 700 MQ COMMERCIAL PROMENADE

OLD COURT RESTAURANT 450 MQ ADMINISTRATION OFFICE 400 MQ OLD COURT COMMERCIAL UNITS 400 MQ SNOOKER CLUB 250 MQ FC LIVERPOOL MUSEUM 300 MQ COMMERCIAL VILLAGE 6.750 MQ HOTEL ROOM MOUNTAIN VIEW 200 ROOMS WELLNESS MOUNTAIN VIEW 3.200 MQ WEDDING CHAPEL

PARKING BUS/CARS PARKING CARS

INDOOR SWIM. POOL 2.750 MQ SCULPTURE GARDEN OUTDOOR SWIM. POOL

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UNDERGROUND PARKING CARS 2 LEVELS

COMMERCIAL UNITS 5.000 MQ LUXURY SUITES RIVERSHORE 12 ROOMS

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SHADING COVER

ROOMS MOUNTAIN VIEW MAIN STAIRWELL & LIFTS

WEDDING CHAPEL

PANORAMIC WALK

PANORAMIC ROOMS

WEDDING AREA STAIRWELL

ENTRANCE HALL

SAFETY STAIRWELL CAR AND BUS ARRIVAL

LOUNGE BAR WEDDING BANQUET ROOM WELLNESS CENTER

LUXURY SUITES RIVERSHORE

RIVERSHORE PATH

CANPOPY COVER SUN PROTECTION

INTEGRATION BETWEEN COMMERCIALAND EXCISTING VILLAGE

INTEGRATION BETWEEN COMMERCIAL VILLAGE AND GREEN AREA

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LEVEL -6

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FACE AND FACADE

EPISODE 4:

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Identity is the big issue of our times. In a globalized world I need, more than ever, to realize who I am and where I am!�

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EPISODE 4:

FACE AND FACADE

ARCHITECTURE GLACE AND URBAN SPACE Oriented architecture generates public and private spaces that have a strong urban identity.

This does not mean to go back to things as they were, but open up to what has never been seen before.

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If we take some people and place them in a circle so that they look towards the centre, the area immediately inside this group acquires a different and superior value compared to simply empty space surrounding them. In fact, it actually takes these specific individuals to surround and define the specific symbolic meaning of that space.

What are the elements that generate added value to this space? At first glance you might answer that it is the geometry of the arrangement, the circle or at least the closed form.

That it determines the idea of a community within the group. Now imagine that the same people, while remaining in the same spot, are

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Abandon the idea of the facade was a mistake, and it was a mistake at the very core of modern architecture’s inability to create authentic urban space.

I do not believe the point that argues that without this ‘clean break’ with the past, it would not have been possible to even develop a contemporary architectural language.” requested to lean towards the centre of the circle, but facing in different directions: some to the right, some to the left, others to the outside or up or down.

One can easily guess that the interior space would no longer have the same symbolic and representative value which initially would not be more precisely defined as a specific space, but rather as a framework formed by randomly arranged and accidental physical limits. What we have just said seems to be the most effective example to describe the difference between a built space that can generate a true urban space (what we use to define squares and streets) and the spaces that fails to cre-

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ate urbanity. Consider, for example, the antiurban areas of any of our ‘modern’ suburbs.

This is a particularly useful example how to explain that squares and streets are, in fact, voids with physical characteristics, which are composed and created by the buildings that surround them. The only disadvantage is that it is not sufficient. What this example makes clear is that the elements that “define” the public space must have something special and necessary to bring forth this urban effect and must in some sense be “aimed” towards the public space.

Basically, to generate added value to the urban public space one must think about architecture as “oriented” and with “meaning” to acquire the double meaning of value and direction. It is not a coincidence that in the desire to add depth to a concept or action you tell them that you want to ‘make sense’, give a direction and guide them toward something, toward a goal.

An approach such as the one just described immediately generates questions but also very important practical consequences. First, it undermines the whole rationalist approach according to modern architecture, which has abolished the idea of facade.

“Modern buildings no longer have a main front. Not even a back or a side. Improperly applying a simplistic idea of democracy to architecture, for they had to face equaly in dignity to others.”

All were equalized from the point of view of ‘rank’ and the facades were then abolished and the phrase “architecture facade” became, a derogatory term synonymous with a superficial approach and morally reprehensible.

Aside from the even ridiculous idiocy to think that the parts of a building can have civil rights like democrats. The idea of a superficial

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egalitarianism, which cannot appreciate different roles, abolished the multiplicity of relations with the context in which should correspond to the diversity of faces (front, back, side and order). This meant that the building no longer had a modern sense and is no longer oriented and related towards the public space and other buildings.

“The modern building has established itself as an isolated object, a building divorced from its relationship with its surroundings, making it impossible to generate an authentic urban space.”

Was it correct to abolish the idea of the facade? According to the argument previous described, no. Abandon the idea of the facade was a mistake, and it was a mistake at the very core of modern architecture’s inability to create authentic urban space. I do not believe the point that argues that without this “clean break” with the past, it would not have been possible to even develop a contemporary architectural language. It would have been perfectly possible to renew the language and remain the traditional ‘front’ as one of the main exercises as all of the great architects of history (including contemporary ones if they intervene in the historical city) would have confronted. Conversely, in the cultural and artistic movement that caused the profound renewal of taste and language in contemporary architecture in the early twentieth century has prevailed, for ideological reasons only.

A programmatic orientation that has denied the value of history and tradition, not for an artistic reason, but because it was interpreted as the result of a perverse society based on social principles. A new company would have generated a new architecture and a new city that would have had nothing to do with the past.

This is indeed the case and the suburbs, unfortunately, have nothing to do with the wonderful city from the past.

Today, after experimenting with the failures as argued, we are in need to give up the science planning to restore a “sense” back to urban architecture. Restore buildings capable of generating real urban space without denying the contemporary world, its language and the sensibility of the time in which we live. In the film Gangs of New York, Martin Scorsese and Cameron Diaz at a dance party chooses its own partner looking through a small mirror.

The position of her shoulders allowing her to be free in making her choice and she could see the potential knights, but his body and his face was turned elsewhere. Hidden, showing that the face is at the basis of the idea of identity.

“It’s evident that the face identifies primarily the identity, but more so the alteration of the face identifies the ‘will of identity’.

That has not so much to do with what you have, but what you want to be.”

The desire for identity is therefore the real content that guides the artistic action linked to the identity. This action may result in the need to make the warrior feel aggressive to frighten people, and the woman to feel attractive and admiration. In both cases, makeup means specifying their desire for identity. Exactly how does an actor wear a mask? Do not lose identity but instead achieve it. Similarly, the facade of a building identifies the desire for identity, often seen in the function, the rank, the relationship with the company and with others of its owner or the institution hit represents, but more than anything it defines identity as a specific personal uniqueness.

In the cities of the two antique world empires, the Roman Empire and the Chinese, the houses were fences that enclosed mini-companies linked to the family or tribe whose private environments were developed and opened only inside the fence and never to the public space. In the Middle Ages in Europe, with the spread of Christianity, is implementing a huge ideological and cultural revolution that completely rearranges the entire society.

The main source of energy was based on the economy of the Roman Empire, human force constituted by slave labour, became increa-

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singly obsolete because it was incompatible with the new idea of dignity of the Christian revolution, that gradually spreads to all social levels in Europe. The company then turns towards the exploitation of culturally sustainable energies. It is an unprecedented flourishing of human intelligence that learns to harness and the renewable energy that built the first machines to replace the biological force of man and invented many of the tools and utensils that are still in use today. The economy then slowly rearranges around the figure of the individual citizen, craftsmanship. A new idea of the relationship between citizen and urban community corresponds to a new relationship between public space and private space.

The houses were no longer fenced, mini-closed societies but became houses and shops opening directly toward the public spaces.

The society takes on a new identity and is truly traditionally representative and yes, truly democratic. The shape of the streets and squares are inextricably identified with the set of single facades juxtaposed to one another. No longer enclosed walls and fences, but facades with windows and doors, like faces with eyes and mouth. The buildings are oriented and the facades look towards the public space by loading huge meaning and power of identity.

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“The facade in this sense is therefore a true invention of western architectural culture that finds its roots in the European city, where the specific identities of citizens.”

This is complementing and shaping the streets and squares of the urban areas. One could replace the facades of buildings with the faces of the people who helped to invent this new urban form. This model is now regarded as an absolute reference for the ideal urban living.

This means that the city plays a European model of the relationship between private and public, between the citizen and the city, including architecture and urban space. That could be called natural, deeply ingrained in the human feeling. We can say that the European city invented it or discovered the nature of the physical and built relationships between the individual and the community, identifying the

system that best express both the uniqueness of the person and as collective force formed by the union of these individuality.

Joined to move forward, to save, to preserve, to have time to think, but above all, to pray and to study. These principles and objectives and common to all human aggregations but, to some extent, common to all biological aggregation.

“Nature tends to unify the density just when defining the mode of aggregation of organisms that evolve into higher and more complex forms.”

It is done to avoid dispersal and conserve energy, reduce exposed surfaces outside promoting physical closeness and contact between the parties. It is precisely because of this contact that defines the meaning of urban architecture and its direction. It is because of this contact that in the process of growing the cells specialize and develop into various or-

gans as well as the faces of a building play different roles depending on the specific situation to which they are exposed: the front, the sides and the back. The architecture looks, turns, retires and defines the public and the private, the functional and the representative focuses resources where needed and save where they are not needed, share roles and functions in collaboration with the adjacent buildings.

This results in oriented architecture and is therefore almost an automatic density understood as the natural and most convenient mode of urban aggregation. Oriented architecture generates public and private spaces that have a strong identity value. This does not mean to go back to things as they were, but rather open up to things that has never been seen before, to contemporary cities where buildings are not isolated objects stuck as painful stings in the living body of an area without sense, but begin to dense and then to navigate. If we really want to go back to build the city in which one live, where one can actually recognize and identify, we have to go towards an architecture that wants to be looked at. An architecture that looks at the people and the city.

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1997 BOLTIERE KINDERGARDEN 2001 TECHNICAL NATIONAL LIBRARY 2003 ENGINE FACTORY HEADQUARTER

EPISODE 4:

FACE AND FACADE

ARCHITECTURE GLACE AND URBAN SPACE

2007 HYDRAULIC EQUIPMENT FACTORY 2008 CONSTRUCTION COMPANY OFFICE BUILDING 2009 NEW MUNICIPAL OFFICE 2009 AVIATION COMPONENTS FACTORY & HEADQUARTER 2010 PANORAMA HOUSE

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1997 BOLTIERE KINDER GARDEN

BERGAMO, ITALY, EDUCATION CONCEPT

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Shaping an high technological content building is perhaps more a design matter than an architectural matter. This stands for both the needed process of designing a complex technological system organism, and also in this case for some pure “industrial design� details. The work space is totally clean and available. People and technical flows are developed along an underground tunnel network which reaches every part of the building. The unavoidable territorial effect of this size has been managed interpreting the metallic technical volumes on the roof as a kind of tower which confers to the building a vague castle shaped character.

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2001 TECHNICAL NATIONNAL LIBRARY

The symmetry of the building was already determined by the grid of the urban fabric. As in most of the buildings that overlook Technicka Street this symmetry organizes functional flows that determining the empty space inside the cylindrical tunnel.

The tower of the new library marks the main entrance and concludes the prospect of Technicka Street supporting the advertising posters of events that will take place inside. The elevations are made of glass and metal volumes that allow you to observe the interior space and is characterized by the big round window broken by the suspended triangular volume containing conference room.

PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC, EDUCATION COMPETITION

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2003 ENGINE FACTORY & HEADQUARTER

The new Polini Motors headquarter includes eight thousands square meters of manufacturing spaces, two thousands of offices and one thousands of racing department. The racing department cylindrical volume covered with aluminium rounded panels, is the main architectural element of the building and its technological image recalls the research activities happening inside. The office volume is totally covered with a glass double skin. The metallic horizontal frames are visible from the outside and together with the racing cylinder horizontality gives the building a dynamic feeling also recalls the world of motors and races.

BERGAMO, ITALY, INDUSTRIAL CONCEPT

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DIPENDENTI OSPITI DIPENDENTI EMPLOYEES OSPITI VIP OSPITI CARICO AUTOCARRI LOADING TRUCKS OSPITI VIPAUTOCARRI UNLOADED TRUCKS SCARICO CARICO AUTOCARRI SCARICO AUTOCARRI

ARRIVAL

OPEN SPACE OFFICE

RACING DEPARTMENT

1 PORTINERIA 2 UFFICI 3 PARCHEGGIO AUTO 4 PARCHEGGIO PER AUTOMEZZI 5 EDIFICI INDUSTRIALI E MAGAZZINI 6 AMPLIAMENTO FUTURO 7 SCARICO 8 CARICO 9 ASILO 10 MENSA 11 INGRESSO DIPENDENTI 12 CASA CUSTODE 13 PARCHEGGIO AUTO COPERTO 14 LOCALI TECNICI

DIPENDENTI OSPITI OSPITI VIP CARICO AUTOCARRI SCARICO AUTOCARRI

WAREHOUSE RACING DEPARTMENT DESPATCH AREA GUARDROOM SHOWROOM GUEST PARKING INDOOR PARKING CENTRAL HEAT STATION

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NT ME CE UC STR TU RE

AL

LOCKING PLATE

LOCKING PLATE

TUBE

THICK SKYLIGHT

D ON OB UC

CANNEL

GALVALIZED STEEL SUPPORT FRAME

ISOLATION

ALUCOBOND

SLOT FOR DISCHARGING OF WATER

SLOT FOR DISCHARGING OF WATER

SPECIAL JUNCTION GLASS - T EXTRUSION

TRANSPARENT GLASS WITH STEEL WITH POLISED EDGES

ALUMINIUM ANGLE

HOLE

CIRCULAR CONSTRUCTION

LOCKING PLATE

LOCKING PLATE

GALVALIZED STEEL SUPPORT FRAME

SLOT FOR DISCHARGING OF WATER

SLOT FOR DISCHARGING OF WATER SPECIAL JUNCTION GLASS - T EXTRUSION

TRANSPARENT GLASS WITH STEEL WITH POLISED EDGES

ALUMINIUM ANGLE

HOLE

DETAIL OF CIRCULAR CONSTRUCTION MEETING WALL

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The new industrial complex provides several buildings placed on two opposite sides of the Chiese river. These volumes have been adjusted upon the bends of the river unifying the elevations into two curvilinear facades facing one another. Towards the river lies a unique coating as a single tape to absorb the different buildings beyond it.

Embedded into the two facades are incorporated some horizontal reflecting steel elements that allow entering into architecture some surrounded nature.

2007 HYDRAULIC EQUIPMENT FACTORY VOLBANO, ITALY, INDUSTRIAL CONCEPT

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EXTERNAL EMPLOYEE FLOW DEPARTING TRUCK FLOWS ARRIVING TRUCK FLOWS THIRD PARTIES PRODUCT FLOW EXTERNAL VISITOR FLOW RAW MATERIALS FLOW

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The building stands on land very constrained by limits for building, distances and maximum heights.

The thin strip of land widens in the south of the site. Here the architectural elements, first compressed and straights, are freeing itselves and start with curvilinear motion highlighting the entrance.

The semi-transparent white glass separators leave the building and hover in space. One of them gets up at the terminal to provide architectural emphasis towards the road junction.

2008 CONSTRUCTION COMPANY OFFICE BUILDING ALZANO, ITALY, OFFICE CONCEPT

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CAR/TRUCK FLOW PEDESTRIAN FLOW

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2009 NEW MUNICIPAL OFFICES

The new headquarters of the municipal offices of Piacenza is the privileged place for the representation of the relationship between citizens and the government. The role of this building can not be reduced solely to the functional efficiency in the performance, but have also to provide a model of balance and integration in relation with the environment. It is a contemporary building both in terms of proper and responsible use of resources and of original approach to material, culture and architecture. The building consist of seven floors above ground and one floor terrace that accommodated some of the technological systems.

PIACENZA, ITALY, OFFICE COMPETITION

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THEATER

COUNSIL CHAMBER

CIRCULAR COURTYARD FRONT OFFICE

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COUNCIL OF THE 99

MAIN STAIRCASE CIRCULAR COURTYARD AMBULATORY

COOLING (SUMMER) HEATPUMP ON ROOF

SOLAR PANELS PV HEAT RECOVERY SOLAR PANELS

RADIENT HEATING FLOOR HEATING (WINTER)

HEAT EXCHANGER FED BY THE URBAN DISTRICT HEATING NETWORK

SOLAR PANELS HOT WATER

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1 FRONT OFFICE 1a COMMON ENTRANCE 2 BANK 3 OFFICE/LIBRARY 4 STORES 5 BAR 6 POLICE ENTRANCE

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1 OPEN SPACE 2 WAITING ROOM 3 AMBULATORY 4 PUBLIC ACCESS AREA 5 OFFICE ACCESS AREA 6 FOYER 7 MEETING ROOM 8 COMMERCIAL SPACE

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This project was born from the desire to create a building that would go beyond the simple role of container of production activities, rising to the rank of real industrial architecture, capable of representing the role that manufacturing industry has in the context of human society as the only place where the processing of materials creates actual added value. The factory is then conceived as the site responsible for the creation and distribution of wealth. The facade of the office building is the element in which it materializes the awareness of this civic and irreplaceable role. It’s inspired by the feeling of firmness and solidity that the solid stone assumed in the form of Renaissance “bugnato” (ashlar), redesigned in a contemporary form that adds to the architecture the specific categories of modernity: dynamism and lightness.

2009 AVIATION COMPONENTS FACTORY & HEADQUARTER MILAN, ITALY, INDUSTRIAL CONCEPT

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The client told us he wanted to live toghether with the panorama view. We answered him instead of “living with” wouldn’t it be much better “living inside” the panorama itself? We had to turn the landscape into a “house” through designing an architectural structure conceived as a machine that could visually trap the surrounding nature.The open sight on the horizontal lines becomes the matrix of the architecture starting from inside out. The house volumes are just occasionally framed by this tridimensional plot of horizontal elements that constitute a kind of physical pre-existence of the place, the three-dimensional exogram around which the architecture is built and that in fact its main tectonic feature.

2010 PANORAMA HOUSE CENATE SOTTO, ITALY, HOUSING CONCEPT

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MATT SURFACE DARK WOOD 1 x 1 cm

FROSTED GLASS

DARK WOOD 1 x 1 cm

IED WIRE

IED WIRE

MATT BASE AND UNDERSIDE ELEVATION

SHORES WOODEN BEAD IN WHITE

SECTION 1

IED WIRE

MATT LACQUERED FINISH

PLAN TOP

IED WIRE

DARK WOOD 1 x 1 cm

FROSTED GLASS

PLAN BASE

FROSTED GLASS MATT SURFACE

MATT SURFACE

IED WIRE

RAW WOOD

RAW WOOD SHORES WOODEN BEAD IN WHITE

MATT SURFACE IED WIRE

MATT SURFACE IED WIRE

SECTION 2

DETAIL OF TAILORMADE TABLE

METAL PROFILE

BLOWN CLOSING RING

CLOSING SIDE WITH PERFORATED SHEET

TOP CLOSURE REDS EXHALATION

FLASHING TO PROTECT THE WATERPROOFING

WATERPROOF FLAP ARRIVAL RODS EXHALATION WATERPROOF FLAP DISH CONTAINING

DETAIL OF CHIMNEY

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CULTURAL SUSTAINABILITY

EPSIODE 5:

462 463

“ 464

The only sustainability that has made the difference over the centuries is the cultural sustainability!�

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EPISODE 5:

CULTURAL SUSTAINABILITY An approach that starts from the specific cultural context does not generate a single architectural ‘style’ or ‘brand’, but just different architectures episodes.

“

Our world today seems to move towards a single cultural and media whole. But will cultural differences continue to exist between the opposite poles of the world? It can be said that the metropolitan areas tend to become more and more similar to each other to become almost indistinguishable. The centre of Shanghai could be the centre of Milan or New York or Moscow or Sao Paulo. The culture of the “Brand” makes familiar and alike places situated thousands of miles far from each other.

The “Brand” is what cancels the identities.

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It makes no difference where I am in the world; the “Brand” always ensures the same service, the same product, the same flavor. I take off from Milan with Prada, Armani, Apple and

I take off from Milan with Prada, Armani, Apple and McDonald and I land in Shangahi with Prada, Armani, Apple and McDonalds, then I move to New York with Prada, Armani, Apple and McDonalds. The “Brand” approach remains indifferent to cultural identity; indeed it claims to be superior to it for determining, conditioning, possibility to cancel it.”

McDonald and I land in Shangahi with Prada, Armani, Apple and McDonalds, then I move to New York with Prada, Armani, Apple and McDonalds. The “Brand” approach remains indifferent to cultural identity; indeed it claims to be superior to it for determining, conditioning, possibility to cancel it. In reality it is a simple criterion for the unification of production in the logic of maximum profit of their concentration of capital. Destroying the cultural differences using the media to impose an irresistible oneworld of taste and wishes is only functional to centralize the mass production, to achieve the goal of producing at the lower possible cost a single product that is desired and purchased all over the world.

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This is what we call “Gloablitarism”, a new form of world totalitarism based on the “survival of the most aggressive”, where our souls and desires are defined by others, that influence us with powerful weapons of communication, making us live in a constant state of dissatisfaction of our material cultural and social condition, promising salvation through the simple purchase of a product, to enter the magical world of brands, a world of selfishness, greed, and everlasting pleasure, but that actually lasts just until the release of the next new product to buy. It ‘s a tyranny of the mind and body. But the true economic wealth is not even in large groups, in the global companies, in the brands.

These are a great wealth but only for the few brand owners and the nowadays financial crisis is just about to prove that there is something wrong in all this “globalitaristic” system.

The real wealth is only the diffuse wealth, which instead of wiping out the cultural differences, starts from them, emphasizing their values.

Therefore we should change the approach and start from cultural differences, taking in-

468

spiration from them, from what makes unique and unrepeatable every single human creative act, including the architecture. We should not desire anymore to be somewhere else: if we are in San Petersburg or Rio De Janeiro we should not desire to be in New York or in Tokyo. We must try to raise the local cultural identity to an universal experience of art.

“Globalitarism architecture must be fought with the opposite approach, starting from cultural differences, from history and from traditions of the context.”

This is not possible for large groups, for those who sell a brand in architecture, but it is possible for small groups, and is something that has nothing to do with industrialization but that has to do with art. We could say that this is precisely the specific Italian culture in general. The hundred cities, one thousands

princes, one hundred stories of culture and art made of our small country the centre of the universal value of cultural differences, competing in beauty, of the confrontation rooted with the contexts.

In the past the great Italian artists have worked for the powerful of the world. I always quote the case of Pietro Solari, which designs the towers of the Kremlin in XV century. Tsar Ivan III wanted “Italian” towers and called Italian architects to realize them. They accommodated this request, but interpreted and “contaminated” the “Italianess” with the local context, as they were used to do in Italy. Inspecting the premises and bricks furnace, knowing techniques, orienting the evolution of them according to their knowledge and their artistic sensitivity. But also they were influenced by this contamination, which changed their creative act.

Therefore they didn’t apply the “Italian brand” to their towers, like the McDonald cheeseburger, which is equal to the Piazza Duomo in Milan as well as in the Red Square in Moscow.

The towers of the Kremlin at the time were called the “Italian towers” but today they are an

unmistakable symbol of Russian identity in architecture. This is the magic of this approach.

The magic was repeated in Russia centuries later with Rastrelli, Rossi and Quarenghi in the beautiful Saint Petersburg of the great Peter and Catherine. This is the approach to fight against “globalitarism”.

We could just speak about “cultural sustainability”. The conference will present some of our projects we believe are good attempts of “cultural sustainability “ and “context oriented design.” In many cases these projects have been chosen as winning projects by the juries thanks to the deep level of contamination of their substance and essence with the aspirations and expectations of the social and cultural context in which they are located. In this contribution we discuss some projects located in different parts of the world: in Italy, of course, Israel, China and Sweden. The purpose of this review is to illustrate how an approach that starts from the specific cultural context does not generate a single architectural “style” or “brand”, but just different architectures episodes, each one of them with its own strong identity and strongly rooted to the context.

469

2007 HISTORIC MUSEUM EXTENTION 2007 ADDA COLOR HOUSING 2009 JAZZ CLUB & BAR

EPISODE 5:

CULTURAL SUSTAINABILITY KNOWING WHERE I AM AND WHO I AM

2010 CONTINUOUS LIBRARY 2010 MAGISTRI COMACINI SCHOOL 2011 QUMRAN CO-HOUSING 2011 BOVEZZO HOUSING 2011 ALTERMARIA VAALER CHURCH 2012 UNIVERSITY OFFICES

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2007 HISTORIC MUSEUM EXTENTION VIENNA, AUSTRIA, EXHIBITION COMPETITION

472

We thought that the new spaces should be a self-manufactured architectural element inside the courtyard, as architecture inside architecture. The relationship with the Gotfried Semper language is a total contrast. We believe that this is the best way to respect the architectural integrity of the existing building. The perception of conflict will be visible along the walkways located in the void between the two walls and also from the main exhibition room.

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2007 ADDA COLOR HOUSING

The area is basically divided into two areas by diagonal pedestrian connections between the school and the green public area south from the site. The complex is an urban character setting up an inner courtyard that becomes real “urban interior space” thanks to the path that runs east.

TREZZO SULL’ADDA, ITALY, HOUSING CONCEPT

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2009 JAZZ CLUB & BAR

The starting point to design the Hotel Chamber bar in Beijing was to imagine being in the middle of a forest in a natural darkness where light filters through the branches of trees. This produces a warm, friendly and very interesting atmosphere and prepare the customers to relax and listening to the jazz music that spreads within the bar. The light is formed behind the walls, ceiling and floor, through the small triangular holes. Space is characterized by dark colors and warm.

PECHINO, CHINA, COMMERCIAL CONCEPT

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ROOF PANEL PLAN

SECTION

SECTION

INTERNAL VIEW

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2010 CONTINUOUS LIBRARY

The building is part of the urban settlement, following the logic of the historical city, favoring the style of construction that is being interpret. This style is seen today when walking from the Cathedral Square through the cloister of the Cathedral Branch which configures a sequence of interconnected urban spaces. The architecture of the new building intentionally wants to reveal its contemporanity, without pretense, without mimics and with respect to the historical context in which it occurs. The interior consists of distinct areas based on various sections and the areas of reading takes place on “inner terraces� along the ramps that connect the various levels and various sections of the library.

BRESSANONE, ITALY, EDUCATION COMPETITION

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TECHNICAL ROOM

MAGASINS

EVENTS

NEWSPAPERS

MUSICAL SPACE

INTERNET CAFFE

GAME ROOM

ENTRANCE

NON FICTION AREA

STROLLERS

FICTION AREA

WARDROBE

BOY ZONE

COMMERCIAL SPACE

OFFICE

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The image that we wanted to give the new building was on the one hand closely linked to technological features and values of economic sustainability.

At the same time we wanted to be in continuity with the building tradition that has made this one of the main geographical contexts in the European history of the build enviroment. It is based on a historical sequence from the “magistri comacini� until the twentieth century of Como rationalism.

The image of the building will also play the second theme of the citadel, which implies a more or less explicit reference to the imaginary figure of the walled city of Como.

2010 MAGISTRI COMACINI SCHOOL COMO, ITALY, EDUCATION COMPETITION

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The project is extending an existing co-housing facility, placed inside a farmhouse. The proposed solution is to connect, along the optical axis, the porch of the farmhouse with a lot that will house the new inhabitants. The apartments are developed in six arms arranged around a semicircular court that represents the concept of co-housing - all buildings facing the new court - and the physical connection with the other two courts

2010 QUMRAN CO-HOUSING BARGANO, ITALY, EDUCATION CONCEPT

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The image given to the new building aims to be strongly linked to technological and economic values of environmental sustainability, but at the same time, it wants to be in continuity with the tradition of buildings in the area. The morphological context of the area is typical for the Lombard Prealps, with a hilly landscape protected from the mountains to the north and open landscape to the south. The building reinterpreted modern technology and the structure of huts and farms in Lombardy through elements such as the gable roof, the lining of the wooden facade and the columns in the front entrance.

2011 BOVEZZO HOUSING BRESCIA, ITALY, HOUSING CONCEPT

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A church that inspires the sense of sacred. The church is the physical space where the spiritual encounter between the creation and the creator takes place; the space-time interface between physics and metaphysics. From the point of view of the cultural sustainability the emotional and cultural relationship that the building establishes with the man is what makes it efficient. The cultural traditions and the materials of a specific place are the real basis from where innovation and invention start. The revisitation and the reinterpretation of the spatial structure and the symbolical power of the Stave Kirke are based in the method chosen for the creation of the special emotional relationship born between man and architecture.

2011 ALTERMARIA VAALER CHURCH VAALER, NORWAY, CULTURAL COMPETITION

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The intervention of qualification providing for an adjustment of indoor and outdoor spaces to accommodate administrative activities. The redesign of the interior layout and distribution routes, with particular attention to the areas of work and formal and informal communication allows the enhancement of indoor and outdoor spaces (courtyards, patios, terraces) which parts of the body integrated functional architecture.

2012 UNIVERSITY OFFICE MILAN, ITALY, EDUCATION COMPETITION

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CONSTRUCTION AND MAINTENANCE DIVISION

LEGAL ACTIVITY DIVISION SERVICE DIVISION FOR RESEARCH GENERAL ACCOUNTING DIVISION DIVISION OF CAREERS, SALARIES AND STAFF

UNITY OF STAFF FOR COMMINICATION

MEETING ROOM FACILITIES SERVICE OFFICE OF PREVENTION AND SAFETY

COMPUTER SERVICE ROOM TRAINING ROOM DEPOSIT SYSTEMS BULSAR AND HERITAGE INSTITUTIONAL AFFAIRS AND INTERNATIONAL TRAINING

STAFF DIVISION

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THE IDEAL OF “SUSTAINABLE”

EPISODE 6:

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“ 576

Architecture is not a science and I’m truely exhausted to hear the word ‘sustainability’ everywhere.

Today I feel we have an ‘unsustainable sustainability’.”

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EPISODE 6:

THE IDEAL OF “SUSTAINABLE”

A POST-ILLUMINIST APPROACH

To prevent the spread of new technical scientific regulations that claims to be the greatest way to reach a new ideal of sustainability and urban quality.

“

Exactly 200 years have passed between the taking of the Bastille in Paris in 1789 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In this relatively short period of time the human knowledge has gone through a great upheaval. The Myth of Enlightenment science and belief in the possibility that this could actually solve every problem has meant that in all areas of knowledge are sought universal rules, codified and demonstrable that they could remove the indeterminacy of the arbitrary and the individual responsibility. All this to entrust the objectivity of a special and specific science designed and coded for the purpose.

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This is the case for all spheres of human activity including of course the economy and

As architects and as intellectuals, we now have an historic opportunity and the responsibility to define the ways in which this ideal aspiration becomes a reality. We have to choose whether to renew again essentially a blank check signed two centuries ago against the ‘science’, or reconsider the concept of progress in the complex of a broader ‘sustainability’.” urbanism that just since the nineteenth century have claimed to assimilate to the exact sciences with analysis, coding of phenomena, the postulation of laws, theories and discoveries. Therefore in every sector the definition of an ideal coincided with the development of a mathematical-scientific model. Today, in the context of economic studies, is the idea that it was fundamentally wrong to want to consider economics as an exact science by interpreting phenomena essentially governed by the sum of individual decisions. The same way as phenomenas are governed by physical laws reduced to numbers and equations in fact manipulated in an abstract sense. According to this line of thinking is where lies the origin of this perverse primacy acquired in economics

579

NYLON TAPES FOR THE CONTROL OF NATURAL LIGHT

SKIN PANELS OF COVER WITH COLORED POLY- SANDWICH CARBONATE PANELS

SKIN PANELS OF COLORED POLYCARBONATE

LATTICE STRUCTURE IN TABULAR STEEL

STEEL CASING

NYLON TAPES FOR THE CONTROL OF NATURAL LIGHT

UNDERGROUND STORAGE WAREHOUSE

from the financial world. Whose tragic consequences the West has paid with periodic crises of the system and which we are experiencing today in the most acute and, possibly, fatal when the financial economy threatens to devour the real economy.

In a sense, the same thing happened in these two hundred years for the city. Prior to the nineteenth century, there was no urban planning, that is, the “science city”. Once you have established a relationship between deterministic city, territory and economic systems, the transformation process in the “science” of urban was in fact already implicitly started.

As for the economy is in fact initiated a progressive transformation of urban analysis through the use of scientific instruments. Hence the definition of quality in terms of “standard” percentages, relationships, dimensions and minimum measures. All legislation that followed and still substantially governs the activities of housing and urban planning, has gone in this direction and in the economy. The aberration of this approach has resulted in the overlap between the real and economy bogus, and in fictitious planning the same thing happened.

580

The city of origin Enlightenment ideals that have occurred in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from New Harmony of Robert Owen

to Le Corbusiers Villas, the models have proved as attractive in theory, as in their application with a complete lack of achieving the ideal of a new and higher urban quality.

Millions and millions of people, the majority of the citizens of the world, who live in the suburbs in inhumane situations produced by the application of those theories and derivation of those models without identity and approved at a global level. Even though the standards and rules are not substantially complied with, the overall urban quality is still unsatisfactory, and always decidedly underdog when compared with the historical city, the city that is built before the “urban science” was introduced.

The errors of the economy must be considered in the same way as the matter of urban science. In fact the essence of the urban theme is much more complex and has implications, however, these are not technical but more scientific or multi technological. Where the relationship with science is indirect and instrumental, the technology does not proceed by successive approximations for models but innovating, but making new, older technologies, modifying them and improving them. The goal is not to interpret reality in an abstract sense, but to satisfy desires and practical needs.

But what is defining, the widespread desire, for the ideal city of today? In the survey on the

quality of life in cities prepared by the Economist magazine in 2009 on the basis of data collected by the consulting firm, Mercer Consulting in New York, more than three hundred criteria used for evaluation were mainly under three main categories; the availability of goods and services, personal safety and efficient transportation systems.

“The availability of goods and services is evidently connected with an opportunity to get production systems into the cities and not only in the surrounding areas, let it be a part of the entire infrastructure network.”

This is what we might call the “urban technology” on the basis of which they have developed the historic towns in the West until the nineteenth century. This technology is often the case as from the military, were in fact the Romans invented a system of military camps interconnected with fast roads specially built to allow fast transfer of troops from one camp to another. After the fall of Rome, with

the gradual Christianization of the empire and the increasing spread of an idea of “dignity of the person and the individual” human energy supplied by slaves became in fact “culturally unsustainable.”

This made a huge energy problem but at the same time a powerful stimulus. So it was in the tenth century Europe for the first time began to discover and explore “renewable energy” (means wind and hydro-mechanical). They were born and spread rapidly mills on the rivers and windmills. In the thirteenth century in England a water mill was connected to a mechanism for fulling wool and so began the industrial era.

The Roman road infrastructure and new energy sources became the foundation for the birth of a new and unique system of production, trade and finance. I was never seen before in the history of mankind that in the thirteenth century had all the characteristics of complexity and globalization of a true capitalist, modern financial and industrial system. The Roman “camps” then turned into real cities, places of exchange, trade, study, training and with locations of schools, banks, markets and universities. The city thus became not only the highest aspiration for the ideals of wealth and security, but also the reference for all those non-material values that could be defined as spiritual knowledge, research, culture, and art.

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Today there are many similarities with that moment in history which was the founding of the ideal of Western cities; the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War has created an infrastructure that was built as a revolutionary communication technology for military purposes, the world wide web. In fifteen years the Internet has in fact revolutionized the global economy. Everything is being reorganized on the basis of this new way of transferring information, money and resources.

“Even today we find ourselves in a situation where the traditional sources of energy are becoming “culturally unsustainable“ because of the widespread awareness of the harmful consequences towards the environment and ultimately the human race itself.”

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So we are in the midst of a great energy revolution to discover or rediscover the sources of renewable energy, to research technologies and materials which is “sustainable” in all areas. The combination of a revolutionary new infrastructure and the revolution in the field of energy are the foundations of a profound economic and social transformation of society that completely redefine the way we live, work and even physical organize territories and the city. “Sustainable City” or the “smart city “ is today the symbol of new lexical form of idealism applied to the design of the city.

As architects and as intellectuals, we now have an historic opportunity and the responsibility to define the ways in which this ideal aspiration becomes a reality. We have to choose whether to renew again essentially a blank check signed two centuries ago against the “science”, or reconsider the concept of progress in the complex of a broader “sustainability”. It must include aspects other than relying solely on technical and scientific components.

This means first of all reject the idea that only “technical sustainability”, and areas related to energy and technology, might be enough to solve the problem. As well as means to prevent the spread of new technical scientific re-

gulations that claims to be the greatest way to reach a new ideal of sustainability and urban quality.

“We face the very concrete danger of the birth of a new caste of “technical and scientific” priests, which are supported by binding regulations, that will claim to hold the only key again. The only key for the solution of all the urban problems solved by science.”

ality itself. It is therefore crucial to recover the history, philosophy, art, sociology, psychology, traditions, cultural identities, and why not also the culture of spirituality and religion. All areas in which the “technical” tools are useless, but those criteria, however, are of high priority and absolute essentiality in the decision-making process of approximation of the real city, to an authentic and comprehensive urban ideal of cultural sustainability.

The Austrian sociologist and epistemologist Paul K. Feyerabend has made it very clear in his critique of the scientific method (As Opposed to the Method, 1975) as the post-modern thought, or rather post-Enlightenment is now aware that in addition to the “sensitive phenomenon” has been reduced into numbers, the totality of reality also includes other aspects which in fact constitutes the major part of re-

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2009 BAMBOO METRO HOUSING 2011 GERMAN CENTRE 2011 NEW SIRTORI KINDERGARDEN 2012 NEW VIGORELLI SPORT CENTRE

EPISODE 6:

THE IDEAL OF “SUSTAINABLE” A POST-ILLUMINIST APPROACH

2012 EXPO 2015 SERVICE BUILDINGS 2012 HELSINKI CENTRAL LIBRARY 2014 ‘PALAIS DE LA PLAGE’ PENTHOUSING

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2009 BAMBOO METRO HOUSING

The project is an example of a building designed according to criteria of environmental sustainability. The shape of the building is based on that of a dragon and meets both technical and functional needs of both environmental and aesthetic criteria. The facades are tilted and facing south just because they receive hundreds of solar thermal and photovoltaic panels, to ensure energy selfsufficiency and reduce CO2 emissions.

SHENZEN, CHINA, HOUSING INVITED COMPETITON

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2010 GERMAN CENTRE

SHANGHAI, CHINA, OFFICE INVITED COMPETITION

Our design proposal consists in the combination of two elements: a green glass growing tower emerging directly from the landscape design, inserted inside a “technological gate frame� that allows the main vertical connections for facilities, creates the solar chemney for natural ventilation, allows the solar panels on the top of the building and creates the main solar screen for the south and east facade. This double opposite movement from the ground to the top for the green glass tower and from the top to the ground for the technical gate is the main architectural feature of the project and creates a strong identity for the building.

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OFFICE BUSINESS SERVICES SPACE BUSINESS SPACE, ENTERTAINMENT SPACE, RELAX AND RESTAURANT PROPERTY AUXILIARY SPACE

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1. CAR PARKING 2. BICYCLE PARKING 3. OFFICE 4. CONVENIENCE STORES 5. BANKING CENTER 6. POSTEL SERVICE 7. TICKET CENTER

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8. SPORT AND FITNESS 9. BEAUTY 10. COFFEE BAR 11. DINING

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16. SECRETARIAL SERVICE 17 CONSULTING AGENCY 18. BROKERAGE

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2011 NEW SIRTORI KINDERGARDEN

The concept starts with the idea of fully integrating the new nursery with the surrounding landscape and the design of outdoor spaces. The goal is to make sure that the new feature will be an opportunity to redevelop the entire school complex, setting up a building integrated with the outdoor spaces. Designed as an intervention for land-art, which integrate and contributes to the existing building with the garden.

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EXCITSING BUILDING

EXCISTING BUILDING

NEW BUILDING

SITE

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2012 NEW VIGORELLI SPORT CENTRE

The approach to the project was twofolded; to preserve fully the structural and architectural characteristics of the original Vigorelli and to insert an element that was both suitable to new uses of the structure and an element of architectural innovation and renewal of Vigorelli’s identity. Along the front commercial property has been added a glass roof that has two purposes; to establish a commercial gallery that gives importance and actual commercial value to the shops under the stands, and to give constitutes a gathering place for small local markets, recreational activities, games for children in order to create real urban space full of life, tied to the neighborhood.

MILAN, ITALY, SPORT COMPETITION

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AUDIENCE RING

OFFICE ZONE EXHIBITION

NEW FUNCTIONS

DEPOSIT

ATHLETIC

COMMERCIAL SPACE

GLASSED ROOF

EXTERNAL ACTIVITIES

COMMERCIAL ROUTES

ACTIVITY SPACE

GARDEN

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COMMERCIAL SPACE 1.338 MQ

EXHIBITION SPACE 295 MQ OFFICE 330 MQ RAVASIO GYM 505 MQ

DEPOSIT 150 MQ CHANGING ROOMS 640 MQ

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The national pavillions must legitimately dominate the Expo’s landscape. The service architecture must be a kind of “basic continuety” in visual perception.

Therefore the challenge is to contribute to candidate this architecture at the Oscars for “best architectural actors in supporting roles.” The general approach to service architecture was to identify a single construction tipology and a single system of functional modularity adaptable and flexible to meet all possible requirements set by the functional program mix.

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NYLON TAPES FOR THE CONTROL OF NATURAL LIGHT

SKIN PANELS OF COVER WITH COLORED POLY- SANDWICH CARBONATE PANELS

SKIN PANELS OF COLORED POLYCARBONATE

LATTICE STRUCTURE IN TABULAR STEEL

STEEL CASING

NYLON TAPES FOR THE CONTROL OF NATURAL LIGHT

UNDERGROUND STORAGE WAREHOUSE

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WHITE PAINTED STEEL STRUCTURE PAINTED STEEL SHEET 8/10 FOTOVOLTAIC PANEL SANDWICH PANEL (ALUMINIUM, EXTRUDED POLYURETHANE) FIBER CENMENT PANEL POLYURETHANE INSULATION FIBER CENMENT PANEL ALUMINIUM TRUSS VERTICAL STRUCTURE HEB 300 HANGING CEILING

INSULATING SANDWICH PANEL

WHITE PAINTED TUBE STEEL STRUCTURE

POLYCARBONATE PANEL WITH ALUMINIUM PROFILE

RATCHED TENSIONED NYLON BELTS

VERTICAL STRUCTURE HEB 300

L-PROFILE FLOOR CONTAINER PVC FLOORING TAPPED AND GLUED CEMENT SHEETS STABILIZING BED OF COMPACT GRANULARS TAPPED PLYWOOD PLANKS

HORISONTAL STRUCTURE HEB 300 STRUCTURE IPE 240 STRUCTURE IPE 300

HANGING CEILING

SUMP SHIELD POLYCARBONATE PANEL WITH ALUMINIUM PROFILE VERTICAL STRUCTURE HEB 300

L-PROFILE FLOOR CONTAINER PVC FLOORING TAPPED AND GLUED CEMENT SHEETS STABILIZING BED OF COMPACT GRANULARS CLS FINISH PRESTRESSED HALLOW CORE CLS PANELS

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The space has been perceived as an “outdoor-indoor” continuity experiment. The shape of the site is a long strip of land. The architecture is conceived as an “enveloped sliding and rotating of volumes”, as a building that is contained into a second architectural membrane. This derives from the energetic concept of the need to have an intermediary climate between the interior and the exterior and by using this sort of “ENVELOPING LIMBO SPACES” it becomes possible to control the inside environment and the energetic performance of the building. These transitional spaces become also a livable place and a main architectural feature of the building and may also be called “the building inside a building”- a theme that crosses the entire history of architecture.

2012 HELSINKI CENTRAL LIBRARY

HELSINKI, FINLAND, EDUCATION COMPETITION

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LEARNING AND DOING AREA STAFF FACILITIES LOGISTICS AND HANDLING FACILITIES SERVICE SPACE MAIN LOBBY AND CENTRAL SPACE EVENT SPACES ADDITIONAL SERVICE SPACE COLLECTION AREA STAFF PATH VISITOR PATH ELEVATOR PATH

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The design of the Palais de la Plage is in continuity with the horizontal scan of the surrounding facades, but processing it as a “variation of a theme”. The green of the pedestrian park on top of the police station and post office together with the green that envelopes three sides of the building, is connected with the existing urban green becoming an effective element of integration. Every apartment has been designed aiming to give to the resident an individual “penthouse experience”.

2014 ‘PALAIS DE LA PLAGE’ PENTHOUSING MONTECARLO, MONACO, HOUSING INVITED COMPETITION

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ALL ROOMS HAVE VISUAL RELATIONSHIP WITH ENVIROMENT

VISUAL ISOLATION FROM NEARBY BUILDINGS WITH GREEN STRUCTURES

10cm 16cm

INDIVIDUAL ACCESS BY CAR AND

BY FOOT

TYPE B PLAN

TYPE A PLAN

SECTION

20 m

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SHOPS UNDERGROUND PARKING RAMP

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TRIPLEX TRIPLEX

RESICENCE FLOW

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OUTDOOR LIVING DECK CAR FLOW CAR FLOW

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HALL

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PARKING PARKING AUTOMATED PARKING STORAGE

AUTOMATED PARKING STORAGE

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PARKING AUTOMATED PARKING STORAGE

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The “storytelling design approach” embeds this values in a narrative plot defining the cultural identity of the building. This allows the citizen to feel the architecture as part of his own personal culture that can be transmitted and shared with the community.

Joseph di Pasquale Architects and AM project has offices in Milan, Beijing and Canton.

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VIDEO

JOSEPH DI PASQUALE ARCHITECTS + AMPROJECT

A new wider concept of “environment” and “context” can not anymore be limited to the energy saving or to the “vegetalization of architecture” but should include the human and historical enviromnet and context: cultural elements, local traditions and even legend and miths are the words of a new symbolical language that aims to create a different and direct link between architecture and people’s immagination.

STUDIO:

Joseph di Pasquale Architects and AMProject was founded in 2004 in order to affirm that architecture in the third millennium post-positivism era should change its nature thoward a new field of meanings and values. Traditions, symbols, iconic contents are just some of the features that are included into an larger comprehensive approach to architecture and urban design that has been defined following the target of a “cultural sustainability”. The pursuit of the cultural identity in a more and more globalized cultural world is necessary to ensure an effective integration of cultures.

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JOSEPH DI PASQUALE ARCHITECTS + AMPROJECT

STAFF SINCE 2005

Joseph di Pasquale General Manager Cheif Architect

AM LAB Niklas Knap Architect

Maria Accorsi Architect

Vulmaro Zoffi Architect

Carlo Caserini Construction design development

Paola Sacchi Construction design development

Stefan Valente On site engineer

Ma Jun General Manager

Zhang Hong Ge Architect

Cui Hong Architect

Wang Jing Designer

Bingruo Duan Urban Planner

Matteo Ranghetti Architect

Alessandro Tonassi Architect

Nazareno Cerquaglia Architect

Peng Hui Fang Video designer

Yi Ji Xuan Animation Designer

Ma Chong Interior designer

AM TECH

AM CHINA

AM ADMINISTRATION

AM PRESS

Michele di Pasquale Laywer Legal Advisor

Annalisa Zanon Secretary Office Manager

Davide Coltro Artist

Daniele Girardi Artist

Pier Rizzardi Architect

AM NETWORK

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TSINGHUA UNIVERSITY, UNIVERSIDADE FADERAL DO RIO DE JANEIRO, SOUTH CHINA UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY...

POLITECNICO DI MILANO

TEACHING AND LECTURES:

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Stimulating self-learning in students and push them to put in practice their visions is the only way to teach architecture.�

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I am not certain, but it is possible that only the self-taught can acquire an authentic preparation and learn correctly. Perhaps only those who have to face the task of learning a discipline unaided can develop a genuine awareness of what they are learning, and can appreciate the value of what they achieve.

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What I am certain of is that none of the conventional pathways for learning architecture are directly geared to professional practice.

This is as true today as it was when I was going through my own university education.

At that time, everything I was told was about completed buildings, but nobody told me anything about how they had been built or what needed to happen to actually practice architecture. And yet that was what I was there to learn!

I have come to the conviction that it is impossible to codify a ‘know-how’ that works for everyone. The self-teaching element remains, and always will.”

It seemed, almost, that the practical side of architecture was a jealously-guarded secret known only to a chosen few, and unknowable and mysterious for anyone who did not have access to it. The question of “know-how” this or that remained a taboo subject.

After we had finished doing the first analytical stage of a project, our teachers would introduce the design stage by talking in terms of “bringing a rabbit out of a hat.” They made the activity of design seem like the work of a magician. The only thing they didn’t say was to utter the magic word “Abracadabra” before getting down to work. I know that this secret creative “hiatus” could not be the basis for any systematic teaching method, but rather than simplistically and conveniently dismiss creativity and file it away under “talent”, I believe it

would be a serious mistake for teachers not to try to address this fundamental element in the formation of an architect.

“universal” principles from practical examples, as it were “drawing out” theory inherent in their practical work.

There are those who argue that one goes to university to learn the theory, and that the practical side is learned through work experience in an office. But in my mind, this dualistic distinction between theory and practice is too idealistic; it smacks of the philosophical ideas of Giovanni Gentile and, in my opinion, is the main culprit for a number of evils. One possible way around it would be to transform the University into a big atelier a workshop where the students could learn by osmosis - by imitative iteration - working day by day alongside an architect and so learning a personal “way of doing things”.

But the university is not just a workshop, nor could be.

The “professors” were those who had the ability to reflect on the nature of the architectural profession and knew how to construct a comprehensive, consistent theory. The words “professor” and “professional” actually share the same etymological root.

In earlier times young trainee architects used to learn their profession working in the offices of “gentleman architects”, but the gentlemen did not limit themselves to helping the trainee enter the profession; they first made an effort to understand their own way of working, and then to explain the theoretical reasoning that lay behind it. This had the aim of extrapolating

“A professor ‘professes’ by teaching architecture, and a professional practices architecture, but the discipline is one and the same.”

So the architecture of those who teach it must be the same as the architecture of those who practice it. This undoubtedly requires a greater awareness and sense of ethical responsibility on the part of those who exercise the

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profession, but also a greater consideration for practical realities in the conceptualization of architecture by those who teach it.

Now that a few years have passed since I first started designing buildings and since I first began teaching architectural composition to university students, I have come to the conviction that it is impossible to codify a “knowhow” that works for everyone. The self-teaching element remains, and always will, an essential, indispensable precondition for teaming a discipline Ike architectural design, which is so intimately tied to the personality, individual traits, and artistic predisposition of the individual designer.

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Shouldn’t we be trying to develop a didactic approach that involves both the profession and teaching, so that in some way this selfteaching aspect can be activated sooner? As a sort of self-teaching accelerator? Why not try to describe to students those dynamic creative processes that are so organically linked to design, in such a way that these young people, approaching design for the first time, are not overpowered by “the loneliness of the designer”? Lean them to help themselves by understanding that those who went before them also experienced the same difficulties and doubts, and learning from those who

went before how to make decisions and what procedures to follow? If we could do this we would stop them from becoming discouraged right at the start, and could given them some reference points to help them find their bearings and begin developing their own personal method.

In other words, shouldn’t we be transmitting to those who have fallen in love with architecture, are taking their first steps so they can evolve their creativity?

It is an ideal of architectural practice, therefore, that seeks its own theoretical dignity within itself, but is also driven by an ideal about a culture that is feasible in its broadest sense, and more aware of its own ethical responsibilities in actually constructing the city and society.

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LECTURES AND SEMINARS: January 20th 2012, Monte Carlo, Monaco, Batilux 2012 The “Sustainable Ideal”, an antidote to the poison of “financial ideology”.

January 20th 2011, Monte Carlo, Monaco, Batilux 2011 Lectures at the Exclusive Architecture & Construction Exhibition & Conferences.

May 11th 2011, Shijiazhuang, China, Guest Editor at Hebei Institute of Architecture May 25th 2011, Milano, Italy, EXPO 2015: The Project of the Global Event Projects and enhancement of the built enviroment of BEST Department of Politecnico di Milano in collaboration with The Ark and Governance Research Group.

September 28th 2011, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro Lectures about Architectural Glibalization vs Cultural Sustainability.

October 22nd 2011, St. Petersburg, Russia, Italian Cultural Institute of St. Petersburg Architectural Glibalization vs Cultural Sustainability lectures with Mr. Giorgio Mattioli, director of the Italian Cultural Institute of St. Petersburg.

November 10th 2011, Paris, France, International Fair of Construction When architectural innovation meets the cultural tradition: the approach of ”Cultural Sustainability“ and three projects in China.

April 16th 2010, Milan, Italy, Salone Internazionale del Mobile 2010 Lecturer at Roundtable on contemporary architecture.

May 16th 2010, Milano, Italy, Faculty of Architecture and Society, Politecnico di Milano Lecturer at the seminar: The milanese way to architecture of tall buildings.

May 20th 2010, Togliatti, Russia, The International Forum New Town Lectures for the Russian Federation.

September 19th 2010, Shanghai, China, Italian Pavillion EXPO 2010 Architecture, design and urbanistics: Italian proposals for the future city.

November 6th 2010, Catania, Italy, The 18th SAEM: Salone dell’edilizia del Mediterraneo Global Architecture and Cultural Sustainability, chinese projects of Joseph di Pasquale.

December 10th 2010, Bergamo, Italy, La città Si-cura Treviglio Municipality Lecturer at the seminar “Faccia facciata”.

November 11th 2009, Beijing, China, Asia Hotel Forum Lecture “Joseph di Pasquale and AM project creative works in China”.

November 13th 2009, Guangzhou, China, Ambiente Guangzhou Lecturer at the Forum Italo Chinese.

2009, Lecco, Italy, Meeting of the Ordine degli architetti di Lecco “La qualità architettonica: un obiettivo comune” with Boris Podrecca, Studio 5+1, Marco CasteLetti, Cino Zucchi. Giorgio Grassi, Marco Casamonti and Stefano Boeri.

2009, Canton, China, South China University of Technology Guest professor lecturing “AM Building and project: Architecture and Movie” and “Joseph di Pasquale and AM project creative works in China”.

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AUTHOR Joseph di Pasquale EDITOR

O T Y S T I E a F C g I a s s e l A AN d a r o u s i t c p M e e t i x ch si ar in

JAMKO Edizioni DESIGN AND COORDINATION Niklas Vigan Knap CREDITS A special thanks to Matteo Citterio for his suggestions and advice. © 2014 JAMKO Communication Via Priorato 6 20134 Milan PRINTED IN ITALY

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