Reflections on Time and Making Architecture in Italy

Laney Talaski: In the July/August 2021 issue of Casabella magazine, you talked about time and how it influences your work. I was wondering how you use time as an advantage in your work, in the design process. Since time is an unpredictable concept, so how do you know what’s going to happen, predict or counter when it doesn’t go where you want it to go?

Stefano: Time is another concept of those that we can talk about for a long time—scientifically and philosophically. We speak about time as architects because of the effects of time on what we do and produce. We speak about time and how we work with it; somehow, we try to either hide the effects of time or use the effects of time. Time is what it is. Time is going to do something to our projects because time allows actions to happen: actions made by people, by weather, by many things. So, the use of time means to somehow use these potential or future actions to make your project. That is the way we think about time. There are temporary projects that we know will end and go away in a short amount of time. So, how do you compare these to some buildings that are made to last longer? You can think of making something to last longer and, ideally, keep it the same throughout time so that the project always appears to be finished. That is one philosophy—to allow the predictable to happen, and to know that anything that can happen over the course of time will happen. It is a different way of thinking. There is one way of seeing the world, and there is another way of seeing the world. We are on the second side of this philosophy; we hope to not predict, but to allow.

Tim Coleman: In the same issue of Casabella magazine, you mention that “you have to consider the ‘intrinsic’ rules of making architecture in Italy…” I’m curious about what rules you are referring to and how they affect your design decisions as well as the final design.

Stefano: The rules… I do not remember what I said exactly, and I can contradict myself many times. I want to maintain the freedom to contradict myself. As for the rules, we live in a society in which we cannot do whatever we want, of course. When we go to the form—the scale of our earth or the measure of our sky—we hold respect for other people that have the same rights that we do. That is why we have rules and that is why rules exist.

We [as architects] like to break the rules somehow, but we do not want to break the rules just for the sake of breaking the rules. Secondly, we don’t want to break the rules just for convenience; for economics or whatever convenience it may be, that’s another rule we have, we don’t want to just break it. Instead, we try to improve the rules. When we see a rule that is tied to us, we don’t want to break it we want to improve it. Improving means giving you the opportunity to keep the rule there; so, we still respect the same rule, just from a different point of view. This makes it not attackable legally. Instead, it gives you the opportunity of transforming that limit, opening that door, and adjusting what that limit becomes to a project.