Building in time

The city already built

Architecture doesn't have to start over every time on empty ground. My starting point is a different observation: a decisive part of our future has already been built.

Italy is a country where most buildings now belong to a fairly distant history. There are 35 million dwellings, about 50% of which were built between 1960 and 2000, while around 30% date from earlier periods. Homes built after 2000 make up just 11% of the total. Italy has roughly 12 million residential buildings, and over 60% of them were built before 1976, the year of the country's first law on energy efficiency.

I don't see these numbers merely as a description of an aging housing stock in need of intervention. I see them, rather, as a picture of the actual condition in which architecture operates today. We live, work, and move through buildings constructed in different eras, according to different needs, with techniques, materials, and ideas of dwelling that often no longer match contemporary conditions.

This doesn't mean that everything fifty years old must be redeveloped, nor that everything recent automatically has greater quality. The age of a building is not, by itself, a measure of its value. There are relatively young buildings that already lack spatial, constructive, or urban quality, just as there are older buildings still capable of a solidity, generosity, and adaptability that remain relevant today.

The question, then, is not simply how old a building is, but understanding what it contains and what it could still become. Before considering it obsolete, one must ask about its structure, its position, its relationships with the surrounding context, the quality of its spaces, the material it's made of, the traces it holds, and the possibilities for transformation it still offers.

The question that should precede every project is: when does a building still represent a value?

The answer can't be purely economic. A building can have a use value, because it's still able to host activities and people; a social value, because it belongs to a community's memory; an urban value, because it contributes to the form of the city; a symbolic value, because it contributes to a place's identity; an environmental value, because it preserves materials, energy, and labor already embedded in its construction (recovering it means recognizing and reusing these resources, avoiding, where possible, consuming more to replace it). It can also hold a value that's harder to define: that of its potential — the possibility of becoming something else without entirely ceasing to be what it has been.

For this reason, I don't believe demolition should always be considered a mistake. Sometimes a building can't be recovered, or keeping it doesn't allow for an acceptable architectural, functional, or environmental quality. But demolition shouldn't be the automatic answer to the complexity of what already exists. It's a design choice that requires clear reasons and a precise understanding of what would be lost, as well as what could be preserved, transformed, or reinterpreted.

This condition also concerns the very way we think about architecture itself. Every new building put up on open land is not a gesture without consequences: it alters the landscape, disrupts ecological balance, increases urban sprawl, and weakens the relationship between city and territory.

The theme of recovery arises from the need to upgrade inefficient buildings, but also from the necessity of rethinking how we transform the built world. The question is no longer just how much more we can build, but what we can do with what already exists.

The very matter of construction also asks to be considered differently today. The reuse and recycling of materials from demolitions point to the need to move past the idea of matter as anonymous, consumable, and replaceable without consequence. Every building contains energy, labor, resources, and time. Even when it must be radically transformed, it is never an object without history.

I work in landscape, architecture, and interior design; I design new buildings and intervene on existing ones. I don't see a hierarchy between these conditions. Every project arises from a concrete situation and calls for a specific attitude.

What already exists requires listening, interpretation, and the ability to recognize what is already present. The new is born within a landscape, a culture, a technique, a memory, and a system of relationships. The existing constitutes a condition of the project. Sometimes it asks to be preserved, other times transformed, expanded, emptied out, recomposed, or even replaced. What matters is that every choice arises from understanding.

This is where my way of designing begins: from the conviction that, before intervening, one must look, recognize, and attribute value, in order to understand whether a new form of life can still be prepared within that already-built matter.

A possible continuity

The relationship between the new and the old is one of the questions that interests me most. I encounter it in historic centers, but also whenever architecture confronts something that already exists: a building, a street, a garden, a memory, a shape of the landscape.

I don't believe contemporary architecture has to pretend to be old to be accepted in a historic center. A new building doesn't become more respectful simply by repeating historical forms, reproducing a cornice, or adopting a language that isn't its own. Copying can create an appearance of continuity, but not necessarily real belonging.

The new, on the other hand, cannot enter a historic place as an autonomous object, indifferent to everything around it. Architecture also lives through the relationships it establishes with a place — its proportions, its light, its materials, and the life that runs through it.

The problem is understanding how the new can belong to a historic place without giving up its own contemporaneity.

A historic center is not a frozen image. It is the visible form of a long succession of transformations. Ancient cities are the result of additions, replacements, demolitions, adaptations, and layers. What we call historic today was, in many cases, once contemporary. Every era has modified the one before it, introducing new needs, new materials, and new ways of living.

The historic city is a living organism, not a museum. Its preservation must ensure that change doesn't compromise the fundamental relationships that make that place recognizable.

This, to me, is the difference between continuity and imitation. Continuity comes from understanding the reason behind a form, more than from repeating it. It can concern the scale of a building, the size of its openings, the relationship between solids and voids, the way a façade shapes a street, the relationship between inside and outside, matter, light, or the sequence of spaces.

In this sense I've always felt close to a certain architectural culture — one that looks at a place before drawing, understands history without turning it into style, and seeks a contemporary form capable of building a deep relationship with what already exists. In this approach, the new doesn't reproduce traditional elements, but recomposes materials, atmospheres, and proportions into a new form. Added elements belong to their own time, but don't set themselves against the building's history. They follow it, interpret it, and enrich it.

This is the point that interests me: the new can be contemporary and, at the same time, deeply belong to a place. Belonging doesn't depend on resemblance, but on the ability to rebuild relationships.

This way of working is distinct from both nostalgic reconstruction and the will to assert a new image at any cost. The project keeps the differences between eras legible and tries to make them able to coexist.

In my work I often try to approach historic places with discretion. It's perhaps a romantic attitude, grounded in recognizing a quality that doesn't necessarily need to be surpassed or corrected. Yet discretion still holds a creative dimension: even an "unfaithful" reproduction of a door, a ceiling, or a detail can be a design act — as long as it doesn't claim to be authentic, and accepts becoming, over time, a new part of the building's history.

In the redevelopment project for the former Cinema Corso in Vicenza, this dialectic between permanence and transformation became the generative principle of the intervention. The shell was preserved as an element of recognizability and urban continuity, while the interior was completely rethought through the insertion of a new spatial organism.

The new interior volume doesn't imitate the existing building and leaves its identity legible. It sits inside it like a new constructive era. The historic façade remains the sign of continuity, while the new system of spaces, paths, light, and functions builds a contemporary condition. Even some details, like the use of bronze in relation to the historic sign, don't seek to reproduce the past, but rather a material dialogue between what remains and what is added.

Every contemporary intervention introduces a new possibility into the existing architectural heritage, and with it, a new responsibility. With it, the project adds a time to time. That's why it must ask itself whether it's capable of entering a place's continuity without interrupting it.

The unity of the project

I can't think of a project as the sum of separate activities. For me, there's no architectural project to which interiors, systems, lighting, furnishings, and details are added afterward. There is a single design idea, one that must encompass every dimension of the work from the start.

Architecture includes the form of the shell, but also the way people move through a space, the light that defines it, the matter that meets the touch, the sound it produces, the relationship between one surface and another, the position of a door, the design of a staircase, the presence of a system, or the precision of a joint.

All of this belongs to the building and takes part in its identity.

Integrated design goes beyond simple organizational coordination between disciplines. It's a precise idea of architecture: every choice contributes to building the overall experience of the space, and no element can be considered secondary just because it belongs to technique or to detail.

In a renovation project, this unity becomes even more evident. The existing building imposes conditions, limits, and possibilities that must be understood together. The structure, the levels, the walls, the circulation, the systems, the natural light, and the new functions are all part of the same process: every decision shifts the balance of the others.

The project moves through different distances of observation. Sometimes I look at the building as a whole, in relation to the street, the surrounding context, and the urban landscape. Right after, I move close to a single detail: a handle, a joint, an edge, a surface. Then I return to the overall view, to check whether that detail truly belongs to the whole organism.

It's a continuous movement from the general to the particular and back again.

The detail is present from the beginning, even when it hasn't yet been drawn in final form. A project in which the detail isn't already contained as intention risks remaining abstract. On the contrary, the detail lets you check whether the idea has real architectural and constructive substance.

For this reason, integrated design requires a continuous check between formal intuition and technical feasibility. I don't consider technique an external limit imposed on creativity. I consider it one of the conditions through which creativity can become concrete.

An architectural idea is complete only when it can hold up against gravity, water, light, heat, air, maintenance, materials, and the labor needed to build it. The poetry of a project isn't opposed to constructive precision. It needs that precision in order to appear.

Sustainability, too, must belong to the overall structure of the project. In its environmental, economic, and social dimensions, it isn't a requirement to check at the end, but a condition that must grow stronger alongside the others as the work is built.

Integrated design is also a form of responsibility. It requires taking control of decisions before the project reaches the construction site, not delegating what belongs to the architectural vision, anticipating problems, checking solutions, and clearly establishing the relationship between each part and the whole.

A truly integrated project is a system in which every element finds its reason in relation to the others. Form comes from function, but also from light; matter comes from construction, but also from atmosphere; detail comes from technique, but also from the overall idea of the space.

The time of construction

Integrated design has this goal: to arrive at construction with an already complete vision. Architecture, layout, structures, systems, light, materials, furnishings, and details must already have been worked through on paper, through drawings, models, checks, and precise decisions.

The construction site is not the place where the project gets reinvented. Architecture must arrive there already defined, without leaving decisions that should have been made earlier to the moment of execution. The project's ambition should be to leave nothing essential to improvisation.

This doesn't mean denying the complexity of building. On the contrary, it means taking it seriously. Precisely because a construction site is complex, every choice must be anticipated and coordinated. A problem solved before work begins isn't a problem avoided — it's a problem the project has correctly addressed.

The construction site is where the idea proves its ability to become matter. Building makes the design vision verifiable: when a project has been thought through with enough care, its nature stays intact and finds a precise translation.

Skilled tradespeople have a fundamental role. Bricklayers, electricians, plumbers, metalworkers, carpenters, painters, upholsterers, and everyone who takes part in building the work possess skills without which the project could never become reality.

But their contribution isn't about inventing new solutions. It's about competently carrying out an already defined vision, translating drawing into construction, represented detail into executed detail, intention into matter.

That's why the image of the orchestra has always struck me as fitting. An architectural work is the result of many people's actions, each engaged in a specific part. But an orchestra doesn't improvise music that's still being composed during the performance. There's a score, there's a conductor, there's an overall design. Every performer must know their own part and, at the same time, understand the relationship between that part and the whole.

The architect's task is to write that score before the music begins — to anticipate the relationship between different trades, coordinate skills, check the coherence of solutions, and take responsibility for the whole.

The wonder I feel on a construction site doesn't come, then, from the unexpected or from discovering a solution I hadn't imagined. It comes from the satisfaction of seeing what I had thought realized, without hitches and without deviations. It's the satisfaction of recognizing, in the built matter, the initial idea — not as an abstract image that stayed the same, but as something that has found a concrete form.

Finally, I like to think that the finished work still carries the effort, sacrifice, care, and skill of everyone who helped build it. Not as chance or improvisation, but as the quality of the work itself. The beauty of a work doesn't come only from the architect's idea: it comes from that idea's ability to be understood, shared, and carried out.

Designing for life

Every project, even one that starts from technical, urban, or functional needs, only gains meaning when it manages to engage with people's actual lives. Designing doesn't just mean identifying a user, a use, or a set of performance requirements to meet. It means asking what life might happen in that space, what relationships it might foster, what everyday gestures it might hold.

Designing means setting up the conditions for something to be able to happen. Dwelling, meeting, working, studying, resting, setting a table, welcoming friends, being alone, embracing. Architecture doesn't coincide with what it looks like in drawings or photographs: it finds its true measure in the experience of whoever moves through it and lives in it.

That's why I don't see a building as a neutral container, simply meant to house functions. A built space shapes behavior, suggests relationships, and sets atmospheres. It can encourage focus or distraction, closeness or distance, calm or energy. Even when we're not aware of it, light, proportions, materials, colors, and the arrangement of elements all take part in our experience.

This conviction becomes especially clear in domestic design. A home is not just a machine for living, nor a composition of rooms organized for efficient distribution. It's the place where life shows itself in its most concrete and intimate dimension. A new home for a young couple can become a nest of love — not because of some particular shape, but because every choice contributes to building an atmosphere of welcome, protection, and intimacy.

What interests me is this balance between what the project has decided and what life will bring in on its own. A house must be precise, but not rigid; it must have a recognizable character, without preventing the people who live there from adding their own story. The project sets the stage, but it can't replace the actors. It can organize the space, give measure to the light, choose the materials, and build a certain atmosphere; then it's the people, with their gestures and relationships, who complete the work.

That's why the quality of a home isn't found only in the perfection of its details or the coherence of its overall image. A house has to become part of life without smothering it. It must accompany time, welcome change, adapt to new needs, and remain recognizable. Its success isn't measured only when it's just finished, but in how it's lived months and years later.

This principle also applies when working on non-residential buildings or parts of the city. Recovering a building means giving it back the chance to be lived in, used, walked through, and recognized again. Even a place meant for culture, work, or gathering must be able to produce experiences, not just host activities. Redevelopment gains meaning when a building comes back into relationship with people and with the city.

How well a space functions doesn't exhaust its meaning. A room can be correctly sized, lit, and equipped, yet still lack quality if it fails to create a sense of participation. A home can be perfectly organized and still not become a house. Between a space's performance and its ability to be truly lived in, there's a gap the project must close.

This gap is where the architect's work takes place. It's not enough to solve problems: one has to recognize desires, possibilities, and fragilities. One has to understand that behind every functional request lies a form of life looking for its own space. It's in this shift — from necessity to possibility — that a project can take on a broader dimension.

The most important act of construction happens in the experience the space makes possible. Everything else — from technique to detail, from calculation to the choice of materials — finds its reason for being in supporting what happens in the home.

Authenticity and beauty in measure

Having spoken about the life a project must hold, I need to be clear about what, to me, is the most important criterion for judging its quality: authenticity.

I don't mean authenticity as literal fidelity to some original condition, nor as a refusal of any transformation. An authentic project isn't necessarily one that preserves everything, or one that exposes existing materials without any mediation. Authenticity is really about the deep coherence between a project's intention and its concrete form.

A project is authentic when every part of it answers to an inner, recognizable truth: when form hasn't been chosen to make an impression, matter hasn't been used to imitate, and light hasn't been shaped to produce an effect foreign to the space. You can't fake the sincerity of architecture — you can only create it or betray it.

This sincerity can also belong to a complex project, when the complexity comes from the real conditions of the work, from the many needs involved, from the history of the place, and from the demands of the life it will host. An apparently simple solution, on the other hand, can turn out false when it reduces reality to an image, or merely repeats an already familiar language.

I'm interested in a beauty measured to its purpose. Not a beauty that gives up strength or surprise, but one that doesn't overreach, that doesn't need to keep asserting itself. A beauty able to express itself through proportion, the quality of materials, light, care for detail, and the way all these things come together to build an experience.

I like to recall the phrase attributed to Plato: beauty is the splendor of truth. I take it as a compass, not a formula to apply mechanically. Beauty, when authentic, doesn't sit on top of a project's truth — it makes it perceptible. It brings out what already belongs to the work, without adding a mask.

In a time dominated by speed and image, this position can seem almost out of step. Architecture is often presented through definitive photographs, perfect surfaces, and atmospheres built to be instantly recognizable. But a building's life doesn't coincide with its image. A work can photograph beautifully and still lack any real quality to live in. It can look formally up to date and have no inner necessity at all.

That's why I consider authenticity a form of resistance — resistance to fashion, to appearances, to the commercial simplification of design. It's also a resistance to the temptation of pleasing the taste of the moment, when that means sacrificing coherence. A project doesn't have to be original in every single element; but it does have to be true in the way it puts its elements together.

This truth also concerns the relationship with what already exists. Recovering a building means making legible the relationship between the traces of its history and the demands of transformation. Full preservation, on the other hand, isn't always the answer: a project's authenticity lies in making clear the relationship between what stays and what changes.

A wall might be kept because it holds a spatial or material quality; a structure might be replaced because it's no longer compatible with a new use; a detail might be taken up again because it belongs to the memory of the place; a new element can be declared as new, without needing to pretend to be old. What matters is that every choice have a reason, and that this reason be recognizable in the finished work.

A reproduction in period style, if conscious and openly declared, can become part of a new history. It isn't imitation itself that's false — it's the pretense of passing it off as authentic. An intervention can evoke the past without being mistaken for it. It can add a new "promise of happiness," leaving to time the task of slowly fusing the different parts together.

Authenticity, then, doesn't exclude memory, evocation, or transformation. It excludes the falsification of meaning.

In a home, this principle becomes even clearer. Form must not overwhelm life, function must not deceive, light must not pretend. An authentic home isn't one that looks perfect at every moment, but one in which people can recognize themselves. It must be able to hold objects, memories, a bit of disorder, changes, and marks of use without losing its identity.

Its beauty is also measured by its ability to move through time. An authentic project is born to accompany life, to transform together with those who live in it, and to let the marks of experience become part of its form.

Perhaps this is the point where authenticity stops being merely a formal quality and becomes a responsibility. To design means taking on the task of building something that isn't just convincing in the present, but able to remain true as time changes it.

Inhabiting time

Every project is born in the present, but it isn't meant to stay there. From the moment it's built, a building begins to be crossed by time, by use, by the transformations of light and matter. A building is never truly finished: its form will keep changing through what happens inside it and around it.

Time isn't only a force that wears things down. It can also enrich, add layers, deepen an architecture. It can add to matter a dimension that the project alone cannot produce: that of experience.

Patina isn't simply the result of aging. It's the visible record of a history. A worn surface, a stone polished by footsteps, wood marked by use, a color changed by light — these tell us that something has happened. These marks don't always need to be erased. Sometimes they're exactly what gives a space substance and truth.

Working on an existing building means engaging with this matter already crossed by time. The traces present in a building aren't all the same: some carry constructive value, others bear witness to use, and others still belong to collective memory or to how an individual perceives a place. The project has to tell them apart, understand which to keep and which to transform.

I don't, however, believe in a romantic notion of ruin or of preservation at any cost. Time alone isn't a good enough reason to justify preserving anything and everything. A building can be seriously compromised, inadequate, dangerous, or lacking in quality. In those cases, intervening also means replacing, removing, rebuilding. But replacement shouldn't be an unconscious gesture: it has to reckon with what exists and take responsibility for itself.

Even a deep transformation can express continuity, when the new intervention recognizes the history of a place and carries it into a different condition. Sometimes it's necessary to free a building from parts that block its transformation, as happened in the project for the former Cinema Corso: the shell and its urban recognizability were kept, while the interior underwent a radical subtraction, one able to create space for a new organism.

In that case, time was treated as a stratification to be interpreted. Some parts remained because they were the continuity of the building and the city; others were removed because they could no longer support a new life. The project consisted precisely in choosing what had to remain and what could be transformed.

A home, too, takes part in this relationship with time. As the people who live in it change, habits change, needs shift, rooms get used in unexpected ways, and furniture moves around. An authentic home holds these changes without losing its essence.

I try to design places able to accompany transformation, to accept a certain freedom of use, and to grow richer through experience. Durability isn't only a technical performance. It's also a work's capacity to remain meaningful as the conditions it was designed for change.

Time, then, becomes a presence the project has to reckon with. Even before a building is built, one has to imagine how it might age, what marks it might take on, what parts might need replacing, and which ones should stay. Real durability doesn't mean keeping everything identical — it means letting a work change without losing its truth.

From necessity to desirability

Redeveloping an existing building certainly means making it safer, more efficient, more accessible, and better suited to contemporary needs. But if the project stops there, it remains incomplete. A building can be brought up to code, fitted with efficient systems, improved in energy performance, and functionally well laid out, without thereby becoming a better place. Technical correctness is necessary, but not sufficient. It isn't enough for a space to work: it also has to be desirable.

Redevelopment, in my view, has to both fix what doesn't work and introduce a new quality, a new possibility of experience. The project has to ask what the existing building can still evoke, offer, and hold.

Technique answers necessity. The project, when it succeeds, also builds desire.

I don't see desire as a decorative element or a concession to personal taste. A space is desirable when it holds out the possibility of a better life: a place that's brighter, warmer, more open, more intimate, more meaningful — a place one wants to stay in, return to, meet others in. The quality of architecture begins when a technical answer turns into experience.

In *De l'amour*, Stendhal defines beauty as a promise of happiness. It's in this sense that I think of a project as a "promise of happiness." It doesn't mean a building can guarantee happiness, or that architecture should take on some kind of salvation-bringing role. It means that beauty can anticipate a desirable experience, can offer a glimpse of the possibility of living under better conditions, with greater intensity or awareness.

A project promises happiness when it prepares a space where something important can happen. Not necessarily something exceptional. It might be a meeting, a moment of solitude, a conversation, a set table, an embrace, a game, a pause. The happiness of architecture is often held in ordinary gestures, made possible by a spatial quality that is anything but ordinary.

For this reason, beauty has to stay tied to function. A room is beautiful partly because it hosts well what it was designed for. A staircase is beautiful when, besides connecting two levels, it builds an experience of movement. A window is beautiful when it brings light in the right way, sets up a relationship with the outside, and shifts how the space is perceived through the day.

Beauty doesn't come after the project, like a finish applied to an already-solved problem. It has to be present from the beginning, in the overall sensibility of an intention and in the smallest decisions. It's the quality that holds together function, matter, light, proportion, and use. When these parts fall into agreement, a space gains a necessity that isn't only technical.

Even in recovering the existing, the promise of happiness must look forward. It isn't about nostalgically celebrating what a building used to be, but about giving it a second chance. Memory isn't enough if it can't turn into a new experience. A place has to be able to keep its character and, at the same time, offer reasons to be lived in today.

Redevelopment then becomes an act of trust — trust that a building, a house, a square, or a part of the city can still generate relationships and quality. Trust, too, in people, in their ability to recognize the value of a space and complete it through use.

A project can't foresee everything that will happen, but it can set up the conditions for something good to happen. It can build a measure, a light, a threshold, a pause, a meeting place. It can give a precise form to the freedom of life.

Perhaps this is the deepest sense of designing: turning a necessity into a possibility, a possibility into a desire, a desire into a concrete form of life. When that happens, architecture moves beyond simply answering a problem and begins to take part in building everyday happiness.

The joy of the creative act

If a project is to produce a new quality of life, it has to come from a genuine creative act. By creativity I don't mean the pursuit of originality at any cost, nor inventing surprising forms for immediate effect. Creativity, to me, is the ability to see a possibility where at first there only seems to be a problem.

Every project starts from a concrete condition: a building, a place, a request, a limit, a program, a budget, matter already present. The work consists of turning this condition into a vision, understanding it deeply enough to bring out what isn't yet visible.

In this process, intuition and discipline coexist. Intuition suggests a direction, sets an image, spots an unexpected relationship between things. Discipline tests that intuition, measures it, submits it to technique, cost, construction, durability. Neither can work alone. Intuition without rigor stays a wish; rigor without intuition produces only a correct solution.

The joy of a project comes precisely from this encounter. It's the pleasure of finding a fitting form, of solving a difficulty without diminishing it, of discovering that a necessity can become an opportunity. It's the satisfaction of seeing that a choice made at the outset still holds up once checked in detail.

I think of the work of the Castiglioni brothers, and their ability to approach objects and spaces with intelligence, curiosity, and lightness. Their irony was never superficiality, just as the simplicity of their solutions was never banality. Behind every seemingly effortless result lay a long process of observation, experimentation, and selection. The joy a project can convey often comes from great seriousness, not from giving up rigor.

Irony, too, can be a form of knowledge. It lets you look at things from a less predictable angle, question settled habits, and search for a solution that isn't simply the most obvious one. But for irony to work, it has to stay tied to reality. It mustn't turn into an empty gesture, a self-referential game.

I'm interested in experimentation when it's able to produce a necessary form. To experiment, for me, means checking whether there's a more precise, simpler, or happier way of responding to a condition. A project doesn't need to complicate itself or add unusual elements. Sometimes the result of experimentation is a new material; other times it's an already known solution, used differently. Novelty isn't always visible: it can lie in the way things are put in relation to one another.

This joy is present even in the most controlled and rational work. In fact, it often comes precisely from the ability to govern every element of a project, from the overall vision down to the smallest detail. When every choice has been anticipated, checked, and integrated, the moment of realization can become one of particular satisfaction: seeing the work built exactly as it had been imagined, without deviation or hitch, means recognizing that the project managed to anticipate reality.

That correspondence produces a concrete kind of wonder: what existed before only as intuition, drawing, model, or mental image becomes matter, light, and space. It's a wonder tied to work, far from the theatrical effect of surprise.

Every project carries with it a share of risk. Even when it's developed carefully and defined down to every part, its concrete presence only fully reveals itself once the idea becomes matter. Not because it needs to be changed on site, but because built matter has a presence that a drawing can only anticipate. Light on a surface, the proportion felt while walking, the relationship between an element and the body moving through it — all of this can be foreseen, but is only fully understood once the idea becomes experience.

Creativity also consists in keeping this tension alive between control and discovery. A project must be entirely thought through, and yet it doesn't stop being moving once it's realized. On the contrary, the precision of the decisions is what makes the joy of recognition possible.

For me, then, designing means seeking a form of happiness already during the work itself — not waiting only for the final result, but finding pleasure in observation, in hypothesis, in verification, in choosing a material, in defining a detail. The joy of the creative act is part of the quality of the work: what is thought through with care and passion can, in some way, pass that same intensity on to whoever will live in it or use it.

A method, a poetics, a still-open inquiry

What I've written here isn't meant to be a manual on renovation, nor a general theory of redevelopment. I don't believe there's a method valid in absolute terms, applicable indiscriminately to every building, every city, every landscape, or every way of living.

What exist, rather, are questions. I try to answer them through the work itself — not always in a straightforward way, not always with the same clarity, and certainly without reaching a final solution. My inquiry has developed over time through different kinds of projects: landscape, architecture, interiors, new buildings and existing ones. The scales change, the programs, the clients, the conditions — but what remains is the need to understand what's in front of me and turn it into a form coherent with the life it's meant to hold.

The method that has come out of this takes the shape of a way of looking, more than a rigid procedure. It starts from listening to a place, from knowledge of its matter, from understanding its traces and possibilities. It continues through integrating different areas of expertise, defining choices ahead of time, controlling detail, and constantly checking the relationship between poetic intention and real feasibility.

For this reason, building, interiors, light, systems, and furnishings all belong to a single project. The construction site isn't the place to fix what wasn't thought through; it's the moment when an already governed complexity becomes reality. I believe in integrated design, in the architect's responsibility, and in the possibility of foreseeing, with enough care, every element of a work. The wonder, for me, is born when a project turns out exactly as it had been imagined, when complexity has been governed before it could become a problem.

But a project isn't only a set of decisions. It's also the story of a way of understanding the world. It tells what we choose to preserve, what we decide to change, the value we place on memory, on durability, on use, on beauty, and on people's lives.

Over the years, I believe I've built my own design poetics. It was born slowly, through experience, mistakes, confirmations, and stubbornness; it took shape through engagement with the existing, in the search for a beauty measured to its purpose, in attention to matter and light, in the will not to separate technical precision from emotion.

A poetics goes beyond style. Style can be recognized from the outside; a poetics holds together the inner reasons of a work. It can show itself in a façade, a room, a paving pattern, or a landscape choice. It doesn't depend on the scale of the intervention, but on the coherence of the thinking running through it.

I don't think I've reached a conclusive answer. But I've learned that designing means taking on the risk of searching for one. An architect has a limited amount of time, a small part of the history of buildings and cities. He can't solve everything, can't change the conditions of the world alone, can't guarantee that every project will reach the desired quality.

So what can an architect do?

He can try to understand. He can refuse easy solutions. He can question what already exists before replacing it, transform without erasing, build without pretending, design for people and for life. He can search for a method, a philosophy, a poetics, knowing full well that every new project will put it all back into question.

This is what I try to do, with the inevitable limits of my work, my culture, my abilities, and the concrete conditions in which every project is born. My work tries to build places where technique isn't separated from beauty, memory from transformation, rigor from joy, architecture from life.

I don't know if that's enough. But if an architect doesn't try to find an answer to these questions, what else can he do?

Perhaps this is exactly where the project remains: in this never fully finished search, in the need to return each time to the beginning, standing before a building, a landscape, a room, or a simple trace on the ground, and ask once again what it might become — without ever ceasing to listen to what has already been.

September 2026

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