Justin Allen
Katherine Armstrong
Craig Bast
Jarret Cromling
Samantha Peterman
Reynaldo A. Matinez
Morgan Russell
Stephen Tepper
Made by students enrolled in the “Video, Media, and Architecture” class taught by professor Marco Brizzi at Kent State University in Florence in Fall 2022.
Alberto Iacovoni (1966) is a founding member of the architecture studio ma0. The firm is active in a field that has expanded during these years due to the notion that architecture is an interdisciplinary medium, linked to the territory.
Constantly drawing upon the feedback between theory and practice through commissions, competitions, lectures, and workshops, each project becomes an opportunity to explore the relationship between form and social role of architecture, which is, by choice, an open, interactive and process-based device.
The built projects are at present the Maria Grazia Cutuli School in Herat (Afghanistan), the new library for the Lombardi School, Piazza Risorgimento and the public garden in via Matarrese in Bari, a square with underground parking in Macomer.
The most relevant unbuilt commissions are the Pincetto garden
multifunctional complex in Perugia (1998-04), a masterplan for the city of Almere in The Netherlands (2007), the detailed design for the facades and public spaces of the Xi’An Milan Park Mall in Xi’an in China (2015) and a recent feasibility study for a museum for Acea in Rome (2021).
ma0 has recently delivered the detailed design for the renewal of the Rodari school and for a new Rugby Stadium in Bari, where the office has also ongoing the renewal project for the central and historic garden of Piazza Umberto.
ma0 has been awarded or mentioned for their many competition projects, with their most recent being a runner-up for the Yeonsu-gu Youth Center in Korea. Among the exhibition designs, the firm has been able to realize in Rome the first exhibition on videogames in Italy: il mondo dei videogames, and held other notable exhibitions in Auditorium Parco della Musica, Venice, Firenze, Palermo, Losanna, Milan, Doha, and Carpi.
The firm’s work has been published in Detail, Domus, Abitare and other international magazines. ma0’s first monograph, published by Damdi in 2008, is titled Borderlines. ma0 exhibited at the 10th, 11th, 12th and 14th Venice Architecture Biennale, at the first Architecture Biennale in Beijing and more recently at the III Biennale di Pisa/ Tempodacqua in 2019.
Jarrett Cromling: While researching you and your work I found a quote saying, “I see architecture as a game, where the design produced establishes the rules but the game only works if the players - the people who live in the space created - have the right degrees of freedom.” What is your approach to creating these spaces, especially with the presence of the in-between zones, public/private, indoor/ outdoor, and artificial/natural?
Alberto Iacovoni: Well, that is question loaded with answers. You know, this idea of the game is twofold. On the one hand, it’s just a narrative. A narrative is always helpful to highlight some aspects of what we do. On the other hand, the “game” has been an analogy for me. It has been a very useful way to reduce all the symbolic and complex aspects of architecture to try to reduce space to its performative values. If we look at architecture as a game we can try to understand how its elements become normative and performative elements, and we can see how people interact. Then, you forget the meaning of form and symbol. This is the first reason why I am using the concept of a game. I was not the first to do this. Many artists and architects use this idea of games in art. Because creativity is always about finding something, as Gregory Bateson wrote, it is not only about playing the game, but also playing within the rules of the game. This is the most exciting part, and that’s why many artists and architects refer to the game because it opens the possibility of something unexpected. The most interesting thing to me about architecture is that the discipline tries to put into a form something highly unknown: the future, which is what will happen after we finish the project. Once the project is built, “play” is what happens after, inside architecture,
and understanding architecture as a spatial set of rules can help us. It helps to imagine how much people could play inside the spaces, how much creativity they could have, how much they could change, and how much they could contribute to the transformation and evolution. Now, talking about these kinds of in-between zones that you’re talking about: private and public, nature and artificial. In a playground, I usually use this image of the classic tennis or basketball court where you have many lines. As soon as you enter that line, you have a set of rules that take place. Every time we play, we enter a new frame; we get out of the frame in which we live, a frame that is defined by our story, our society, and the place in which we are, and we enter a new frame where there are different rules. By playing and accepting a completely different set of rules, you can imagine a different way to relate to others. This is why I think the lines and boundaries and how you design them are significant and it is important to work on the porosity of these boundaries. There are different points of view on this subject because, for some scholars, we need boundaries. After all, boundaries are where conflict can happen. Without boundaries, you cannot have conflict. Without conflict, we cannot have a progression or a evolution in society. But the reality is that the contemporary city is built on boundaries that produce separation, fragmentation, and segmentation, without nurturing any “positive” conflict. We have on the contrary to work out how boundaries can become elements of connection, exchange, relation.
Samantha Peterman: What made you decide to work with play? And what does that mean to you?
Alberto Iacovoni: Part of my story at the beginning has been with a group called Stalker, a group of artists and architects in Rome. I had worked mostly with them for four years, and game was an amazing device that created this frame in which we could meet, exchange, and have a relationship with the community of Kurds refugees we were working with. Game, in that case, was really a great
tool to start a conversation. I remember hearing these guys once say, “these guys are completely crazy, completely nuts,” because we were doing things that they were not expecting. We once bought 1000 white soccer balls and asked them to write on these balls their stories and that happened during a very playful event that we made with them. We were no longer architects, nor those bourgeois intellectuals, we were not artists, we were not Italian. We were playing a game together. It has been fantastic, so it’s a great device to change the way that
“We were no longer architects, nor those bourgeois intellectuals, we were not artists, we were not Italian. We were playing a game together.”
people interact with each other. But, of course, we did not invent that use of play as a tool to change the interactions in the collective realm. It’s been around since the avant-gardes of the 60s. And I learned so much about play by studying some groups like the situationists or the radical architects, many of them in Florence. If on the one hand play is powerful in how it can subvert how we interact in space, on the other hand, it is a tool to deal with the life that will unfold in the spaces that we design. I always feel that as architects, we are taking on some responsibilities that we can not in the sense that we have to decide the lives of others we don’t know. Except for the guy that you design the interior for, and in that case, it is very difficult. We have to enter that person’s intimacies and debate and discuss every minor and intimate detail. In the common practice, we don’t know the dwellers of our projects, we just have a vague idea, based on the client’s programs, or some quick surveys. But then, who will really be the real dweller of what you do? You don’t know. This is why I think it is useful to view architecture as a game, as a set of rules. Having loose rules means that we can give the dweller the possibility of inventing the most gameplay possible. That’s why I think play is a good way to see the design process of architecture.
Jarrett Cromling: Stating with a quote taken from the firm’s website says,” the firm’s architectural vision is defined as a system of spatial rules – a playground – able to modify the relationships between space and its inhabitants, between public and private, indoor and outdoor, artificial and natural, real and virtual…”. The visions seem to align with projects like the Fun Palace and the works of Yona Friedman, The Spatial City. ma0s Projects like Playscape, the Butterfly Effect, and much more shine light on this take on architecture. How and did these works inspire you and what do you have to say about the need for flexible spaces? Especially pertaining to public spaces.
Alberto Iacovoni: How do they inspire me? In many ways. Mostly the texts were very important, my bible is the Bulletins of the Situationist International movement, and mostly the first four issues are amazing, there are so many texts that are so clear, so simple. And I discovered that many things that we were doing had been done exactly the same 20 years before... Things that, you know, the Florentine and Austrian radicals did.
Many of these things we were doing, without even knowing, have been done before. Sometimes you’re right to a point in which there is a kind of entanglement
that it starts. And then you start to do things that follow a sort of narrative that brings you to the same results, sometimes to the same mistakes, sometimes to the same idea that others had before you. I think that it’s about getting inside a story and coming to the same conclusion; of course, you know, in a different moment with the same outcome. I don’t know if it is a good answer to your question?
Jarrett: I understand what you’re getting at. Mostly, for me when I first came across these groups. It was an earth shattering moment for me, because I’m used to the professionalism of architecture and this new “to me” architecture and these experimental projects, exhibitions, and these more playful designs spoke volumes. There’s so much to it, you couldn’t really paint it in one stroke. It was just exciting to see architecture expressed in different manners, besides, the professional architecture.
Alberto Iacovoni: You mean the relationship between professionalism and what you do with all this Avantgarde? I think that there is really a divide between these two different approaches. There is a genealogy of architects and designers that every time they design something, they try to reinvent things from scratch, like inventing hot water. It’s something that comes not only from the radical but also from the story of Italian design. Achille Castiglioni, for example. every time he had to design a chair, he was trying to reinvent it, questioning the basic fundamental reason for everything, trying to invent an object of space and architecture. This is a way to work, but the other way is just trusting your pleasure, your instinct, and
you don’t really question the wisdom of what you’re doing. This, to me, is the profession. You have great architects that are doing fantastic things, but they probably didn’t invent anything. But we have to consider that what is built is more important than what is written in architecture. You can have a fantastic idea, you can be the first one to elaborate on this idea, and you can also do a fantastic project on this. But then the first guy that arrives and can build that idea is the right person. The avant-garde always highlights some scenarios that are always quite dramatic. They’re always pointing towards critical aspects, situations that can be very frightening. And then those who build, they take some part of that and neutralize this; they make it into a building, sometimes thanks to the avantgardes who were there before preparing the ground to new themes for which their contexts were not ready yet. It is the same with music: if you played Schubert at the time of Mozart, it would sound strange. But then, little by little, the languages of the avant-garde become the new normal...
Samantha Peterman: A lot of your designs seem to have an element of environment incorporated in them. How do you go about picking those elements and how would you say the environment affects your work?
Alberto Iacovoni: That is a good question. Let me say three things very shortly. Many of my colleagues are angry towards sustainable architecture. They believe that sustainability is a technical problem, like making a water closet. To make architecture that is zero carbon is not an architectural quest. I don’t agree with them, but I also think that to make a building that is covered in greenery is not the answer, to me the answer is what we proposed in the “Experimental Architecture” section at the Venice Biennale: to densify rather than hybridize, nature on one side, the city on the other. To make the two realms stronger, a stronger city in a stronger environment is the way to deal with sustainability, with all the struggles that it implies.
Craig Bast: One of the most interesting projects that I came across while viewing your work was the Acea Museum feasibility study. I thought this study was interesting because you were working with the water center that is on the preexisting site. So, my question is how did you compare and contrast with what you would keep from that original site and what you would be creating and including onto this new addition?
Alberto Iacovoni: Yeah, this is a great question, I am very happy that you picked up that project because it is very recent and sometimes I have to digest our projects before putting them into a lecture. That was exactly this issue of that project, we had this unbelievable reservoir that was a type of space fiction architecture on one hand. Then we had this low tank that is gigantic. I think that in all the good projects you somehow not really differentiate what was there before and what was there after. Now forgive me for the parallel, but if you think about St. Peters, could you say which interventions were made by Michelangelo, Raffaello, and Bernini? You read all of it as one thing. Now of course I don’t feel like any of these guys nor the very good architect who designed the reservoir can be considered at that level. This is a good example to show how you can rethink what you had before as part of your project. Where everything is valuable and every trace can be interesting. There is a nice quote that I always use by Rem Koolhaas, he said “towards modernity we have to be like as detectives on the trail of a spicy crime.” I think that we have to value the existing traces and include them as part of our project. I design this, I cannot erase this, so what do I do next? This project with the vaults was trying to integrate the new museum into a new building and create a new unit.
“I think that all the good projects are projects which you somehow not really differentiate what was there before and what was there after.”
Justin Allen: Many of the projects presented on ma0 are created at a variety of scales from public outdoor spaces to private interior spaces such as a single room. How do you go about working with all these scales and creating a program for each of them that works with the scale of the space?
Alberto Iacovoni: That’s a very difficult question to answer. [laughs] First of all we have our own weaknesses but they are also our strengths. The fact that we work at this diverse scale, which is fun and interesting, at the same time it is also somewhat difficult. We didn’t specialize in anything, we have a broad understanding of everything, but not so much anything specific. It’s linked with the outdated idea of the architect being capable of designing everything from the spoon to the city. Despite the fact that we like to reclaim thisrole for the designer, this variety of scales and programs has been also built on chance. But its true that once you have a strong approach and strong ideas you can work with them at different scales. Probably what keeps together the different scales of our project is the focus on the people,
the attention to the smaller elements of architecture that can affect the way we live and move through space. I don’t want to sound too humanistic but keeping people at the center of what you do is a way to bring all things back together.
Stephen Tepper: Your works are split between Architecture, Interior, Exhibits, and urbanism. Do you believe there are consequences to splitting up your work and not having a specific focus, or do you think that it’s more beneficial to have this wide variety?
Alberto Iacovoni: Well, as I was saying before, to have this wide variety probably is not beneficial in terms of career. By specializing you get to be known as the most excellent designer of something specific, then probably your career can really have a boost. A typical question asked to architects by others. ‘What do you do? Do you do Hospitals, do you do schools? Well I mostly do public architecture, which means public spaces, public buildings, I also do exhibitions, and if you want I can also design your apartment. It’s not easy, it’s much easier to say I design hospitals, which I think is something very difficult to do. So, when you have this great variety to split your work, it is important to allow others to navigate through your projects. You have
seen on our website for example, we tried to make a collage of all these different projects with this slide show that is now our homepage. Trying to create links in between the different scales. So, this sequence of images with different phrases on them, it is a way to create some hyperlink in between content that belongs to different contexts and, different. And then you need to split your work, otherwise in a production that is so diverse as ours you would get lost.
Morgan Russell: How do you differentiate between temporal architecture, such as exhibition spaces, with more permanent architecture?
Alberto Iacovoni: What do you mean? How do we differentiate?
Morgan Russell: More so the approach and intention to having these very specific exhibition spaces and how there’s that separation through planning, and the approaches you take with those.
Alberto Iacovoni: Well you know for example one thing that we don’t like in exhibition projects is that they are so limited in time, the fact that you do something and then you throw everything in the garbage. At the same time it’s fantastic how they go very
fast, you can have an idea and you can experiment with it and build it. Something which is so frustrating at times in architecture – our square in Bari has taken ten years to build, but maybe because in Italy it is so slow in building public projects. So on one hand exhibition projects are fantastic because they go very fast, allowing you you to start an experiment to build it and see how it goes. But then you have to trash everything that has been done. That’s why one of the concepts in which we work is to make exhibition projects that are productive– that don’t end when the show is over. What do we do with the materials? What do we do with the elements of the exhibition? Many exhibitions try to extend the lifespan of their elements by being reused, being distributed, being able to be reused for other purposes, and so on. But in general, what is in common between the different scales is always our point of view from the user. I was very recently in a meeting, we were talking about the role of designing exhibitions for contemporary art and there was this other architect who was in charge of the Fondazione Merz. Mario Merz is a famous Italian artist who died a few years ago and this guy– the architect– had been in charge of all of these exhibitions of Mario Merz. And I really understood that the difference between me and him was that
while we were both architects working in exhibiting art, he was starting from the work of art– so he was designing space all around the work of art, while I was designing the space all around the visitor. So we were starting from the opposite points of view, and the way we approach to an exhibition project, starting from the visitor, is similar to the way we work in permanent project, starting from the dweller. I think this change of perspective is important, but then of course sometimes it depends on which contexts you work.
Katherine Armstrong: In projects such as Carsicittà or Les Causeuses you seem to be able to take the social, cultural, and economic energies of an environment and redistribute them at a human scale, creating conduits for human activity. How do you use concepts like spatial rules and the idea of boundary to achieve this intrinsic connection between urban scale, space, line, and person?
Alberto: There is something I think I have learned from Rem Koolhaas. One of the most important things he does when doing a project is always reshuffling the program, trying to understand the program so that there are more enhanced relationships between the different parts of it. Usually a client gives you a set
of functions; this also gives an idea of the relations that can happen between these different functions. So we always first take this given program and try to reshuffle it to obtain the maximum intensity of use and the maximum friction of attraction between different realms of a project. We always start reorganizing the program following a public to private gradient and by looking at the program from this point of view, we are trying to understand how these different realms can exchange most effectively. I think this is how it is possible to manage the project from the scale of the room to the scale of the city and to uphold the concept through the different scales.
Justin Allen: Over the years the way architects express their works to the public has changed from written books all the way to graphics and videos today. How have these ways of expressing your designs changed over time to today and how has it helped you get your ideas out there? Has this way of communicating works digitally or physically changed your design process or works?
Alberto Iacovoni: It’s clear that communication is very important to architecture. Not just because we communicate with each other but also
because we must first understand what we are designing. Despite the fact that architecture is very complex and can deal with very complex situations, the project can’t keep together so many aspects. Moreover in the communication the idea of a project has to be compressed in few concepts, and this can be terrible because it reduces the complexity of architecture; that’s why the communication of a project should be able to grasp precisely its core values. This communication is very useful because it helps you understand what the main idea of your project really is; what the driving force is. If used in this way, communication - images, diagrams,
collages - is very useful to understand the main drivers of a project, not just a tool to have something publishable on the medias. From my experience as a professor, I see that this is a struggle for students, this search for a representation of a project that sometimes isn’t really speaking of its core values. The image is not something you attach afterwards, but a part of the project itself. If we want to go deeper into the tools we use like collages, images, renderings, and so on, I have to say that to me this dictatorship of realistic renderings use is terrible. Not because I think that renderings are bad or because it’s not good to show how things are going to be, but the problem
“If we want to go deeper into the tools we use like collages, images, renderings, and so on, I have to say that to me this dictatorship of realistic renderings as a main use is terrible.”
is that sometimes when you design something you have to leave some zone of imagination and indetermination because not everything can be perfectly determined. Nowadays everyone is used to getting a perfect rendering and the client will know better than you what they expect to get - this makes issues for interior designers especially. For example, you have a client with a Pinterest board with hundreds of designs and they ask, “why can’t you make me a rendering like this or use these pieces?” Where in the past the architect had more authority when dealing with the client. So in the end I’m not saying that this version of rendering is removing the total
power of the architect, but it starts to take away the imagination of the work and leaves a more concrete expectation than a creative creation. At my firm we have been using a lot motion graphics to show the temporal dimension in architecture, to see how the lights and other conditions change with time. Now I’m very interested in artificial intelligence but it can be very scary. It could almost be like the new Photoshop, but we still don’t know how it will affect the process of producing images.
Justin Allen: I’ve seen one where people had an AI create art pieces that were very realistic and then were entered into an art show and won first prize with an art piece that wasn’t even by a person.
Alberto Iacovoni: On one hand this idea of an extremely advance software to which you can speak and ask to elaborate starting from words and ideas is very interesting, but we still don’t know what the consequences will be... probably many people will lose their work!
Morgan Russell: Do you believe there is a disconnect between conceptual architecture and the built environment? Within competitions to the actual project-how, much of the final creation is yours?
Alberto Iacovoni: I wouldn’t say so much that there is a conflict between ideas, theories, and the built work. I think it is more a question of how good you are at dealing with the relational aspect of the work. The same exact idea can produce total failure or a total success– the only difference is the way you play with it together with your collaborators, with the clients, with the politicians, and so on. So I think that there is not necessarily a conflict between theory or practice and building something. On the other hand it is true that many architects are totally disconnected from reality. Many of my colleagues– architects that think architecture is something different from ecological problems, or gender problems, or social justice problems. They think that architecture is a discipline that has its own rules with a self-referential discourse. Of course as architects we always have to rationalize what we’re doing, we have to build discourses, we have to build narratives of what we do but at a certain point these narratives have to root themselves to reality, and build on a loop between theory and practice with which architecture should always be confronted.
Reynaldo A. Martinez: Utopian Realism; how can an idea as broad as utopia become attainable? How do you
define it, and how do you believe you achieve it in your projects?
Alberto Iacovoni: Everytime I come here and am preparing a lecture, just because I have known Marco for a long time and I don’t want to bore him with the same narrative, I am trying to find new narratives. One of my ideas is for a lecture called Failures. [laughs] So many projects have finished at dead ends, often for reasons that were not depending on us. But this doesn’t mean that we have to give up. Also if we are like Don Quixote and the windmills, trying to fight forces that are bigger than us. Still I think that we have a possibility to exercise liberty or something that has a political aspect. Despite all the failures.
Reynaldo A. Martinez: In your project, Piazza Risorgimento in Bari. The main function of the benches, to turn freely, was later restricted by the local government, citing it as a negative function to the public. How do you deal with the distortion of the primary intention of a design?
Alberto Iacovoni: Sometimes you have to face decisions that are so stupid that there is little to do. As it happened with the rotating benches in Bari, when they asked the producer to provide them with a lock to prevent too much excitement in public interactions. Sometimes in this process there are a series of choices that are not so clear and sometimes it’s just by chance that changes and determines what you are doing. Still, despite the block of the benches, there are other values at play in that square. Mostly what I call a “diverse order”, a loose and apparently shuffled distribution of the benchesfrozen in a random configuration - that offer many different possibilities in the way people can distribute, sit, interact.
Reynaldo: Do you consider this a failure or a success?
Alberto Iacovoni: We consider this a success because it is one of our most known projects and is very successful.
Marco Brizzi: Especially in publications and media.
Alberto Iacovoni: Many, many publications. To me the most problematic thing was the maintenance. Those benches are quite luxurious, and the problem is that the slats of wood are taken out by individuals.
Jarrett Cromling: What power do we have as architects to influence the users of the built environment, is there any? Can Architecture be a tool to address social issues?
Alberto Iacovoni: Absolutely, yes. In the history of architecture, we always have this movement where all the architects were saying that, yes, it was a tool for addressing social issues, then in another moment they said, no, architecture is totally autonomous from social issues. I think that the two things are true at the same time. We have buildings that were meant to be something specific and they work as something else. In a fantastic way, they become something else. We have prisons that can become hotels, can become schools, can become housing. So it is true that architecture lives in this condition where once you build it, it is a story that doesn’t refer to the intentions of the project anymore; it has autonomy. But this is a very interesting aspect of architecture, the fact that you can’t build
without rooting the project on real needs but at the same time you have to face an unpredictable future, a future that you could - and should - include in the project that you are developing in the present. Imagine that you’d do something for somebody now, but then you also have to do something for somebody tomorrow or the day after tomorrow and the next following. This is not only a social issue, but it’s an ecological issue. It has been part of the architectural debate since the fifties and sixties, and I think that it’s totally still really important. The question is then if architecture can really influence the behaviors of the people. One of my favorite examples always is the panopticon or, the most perfect prison that you can imagine. It is an architecture that is clearly imagined, designed, and built to control the people. Sometimes as architects we want to trigger some behaviors or influence people to do one thing more than another. But what we should do is keep in mind that we really don’t know what the people will do. In
“In my experience, we have to be open to unpredictability.”
my experience, we have to be open to unpredictability. It is the most difficult thing to do, more than imagining what people would do in your project or trying to force or stimulate people to do something more than another. It’s very interesting to me to multiply the range of possibilities that architecture can offer than reducing them to a given set of behaviors, like the panopticon does.
Katherine Armstrong: In a period where the rise in architecture’s popularity is derived more from its association with a brand name than the people it affects, how do you think you can be authentic as an architect?
That is to say, how do you pursue your notion of architecture while answering the way it can affect and improve people’s lives?
Alberto Iacovoni: Well, the idea that architecture is increasingly linked to brands is true. I also think that the rule of communication in everything that we do can be a problem too: think about how very important words like resilience or sustainability all become empty sleeves that you can fill with any content... The question today is really how you can give substance to words that are important,
how you can let your project speak by itself and not through these slogans. This is the problem because sometimes communication is just packaging, wrapping something that is completely different on the inside. It’s really this issue of authenticity of what you do and what is interesting. When you do a real project and deal with real people, the public administrator, the dweller, then it’s true that they are looking for some keywords that they can use in communication, but every time you do real projects, you also have to face real problems. When you work in a real context, there are real things on the table, you have to find something good for the newspaper, which is an important element, but you have to start from the real problem first.
Katherine Armstrong: I know you’re a teacher, and I am interested in your advice because, as students, I think we are very naive to the field of architecture when beginning to learn it. From the start, we are exposed to the wide world of architecture, and I would like to know if you could give insight into how we, students, can find authenticity in our own work with such little experience?
“For me, I believe that the first thing is to learn, to listen, and to understand reality. Reality isn’t a monolithic concept, but I think we have to in every way to understand and comprehend reality, site, territory, and community.”
Alberto Iacovoni: I believe that the first thing is to learn, to listen, and to understand reality. Reality isn’t a monolithic concept, but I think we have to in every way to understand and comprehend reality, site, territory, and community. This is the most difficult thing because we, as designers, work to abstraction. We are confronted with complex sites loaded with story, relations, dynamics, and so many things, and so you have to immerse yourself in that and try to understand, to smell, to listen, to watch, and to picture something from that. But then there is a moment when we need to make a jump from that to abstraction; to simplify all of this complexity, as you don’t have a project that is simply growing from understanding the complexity of reality. At a certain point, you have to make a selection from the information, establish a priority and define what is more important from all of this information. But you always have to go back and understand how your choices take you one direction from some of the thousands of questions that emerge from a single site and try to understand how your choice is responding to the issues emerging from the site. The way you understand the site is not only about going there, taking pictures and making reports, speaking to people, and living in a place; it is also how you draw that
place and represent it. For example, in the ma0 little pink book, there is a little chapter on the color of the layer you use in CAD. On a black screen, if you use a yellow line or a blue line, those lines have different weights, the yellow line is more visible, and the blue line is less visible. So if you draw, on your computer, a section of the wall with the color blue and then use yellow for the paving, then for me, it’s totally wrong. This is because you have to represent reality in this immensely abstract tool that is CAD software, and you have to still to feel what is solid and what is not. So just like when you print and make the section line thicker and the paving lighter, you also have to use it in the same way in software. It’s a question not only about how you servey the site but also about how you represent it, how you draw it, the way you communicate it. This is part of the knowledge you can have of a specific site and, to me, part of how you can reach an authentic relationship with the site. Then your project can be one of the thousands of solutions that can be applied to the site; maybe it’s not the best, but if you have made everything to comprehend it, then maybe it could be.
This interview with Alberto Iacovoni granted students insight into his authentic approach to architecture from urban to human scale, which utilized a unique spatial approach based on the idea of ‘game.’ The discussion centered around topics ranging from the different forms of architecture from temporal to permanent as well as his own insights into media communication within the architectural world. Alberto also helped us students understand how we can use conditions of a pre-existing site to inform the architecture that will be placed within it, with a unique humanistic outlook to design. Through his design, he is capable of advocating for his political and ethical point of view.