“I think that architecture should speak to people. It has succeeded when every single person manages to live within the space that it creates in complete ease. People use the space, they feel that they can attribute values to it. They even discover things they did not know and question others, they themselves become subject to scrutiny and their own individual experiences gradually cause them to become aware of what space is and to experience its physicality and irrationality. They thus become aware of its meaning through the use, on separate occasions or contemporaneously, of highly communicative objects, loaded with meanings, with an enormous, even astounding power—as Raymon Carver said when talking of the capacity language must possess when describing common things. In embodying the function which merely provides the raison d’être, they make it desirable. Through a hardly won experimentation, architect expresses the people’s needs artistically.”—A.I. Lima, 1995

Biographical Note

Antonietta Iolanda Lima. Palermo 1941. Degree in 1964. Professor of the ‘History of Architecture’ (Faculty of Architecture, Palermo) and ‘History of Landscaping’ (Master School of Garden Architecture and Landscaping, Palermo). Her publications probe History in order to identify processes and values; for a free, democratic, creative architecture. Whether small or large scale her projects undermine the boundaries between the disciplines, claiming architecture’s singleness. Basic values: a landscape-oriented vision, from the object to the urban development scheme; particular attention to the human being within his/her complex integrity, to the nature of the materials, to light.