Threshold of twilight
2024–2021
Series of projects on architecture as an interpretation, exploring the liminal spaces between light and darkness. These projects capture the fleeting moments when day transitions into night, evoking a sense of mystery that blurs the boundaries of reality
California Polytechnic State University, 9 August 2024
Architecture is a perceptual phenomenon. Its occurrence in the world is also the consequence of a historiography. A stratigraphy of interpretations extended over time that defines the existence of a work.
Castiglione delle Stiviere, 12 October 2023
The villa Casa di Arianna near Lake Garda in the form of a miniature palazzo with a rectangular marble living room with a cuspidated ceiling.
Museo Agostino Peopoli, 26 May 2023
Even if they are small works, I believe that in this historical moment it is more important to focus on the method. After all, even a book, despite occupying a small physical space, can have a significant impact.
Calcata, 22 May 2023
Through a small passage, I enter a long living room with a trompe‑l’oeil façade that frames—inside a perspective of arches—an imaginary landscape.
Parma, 26 May 2021
An apartment near the train station with polychrome sequence of rooms, diagonal striped parquet and MDF doors.
Marsala, 16 May 2021
The sunset bar restaurant Mammacaura at Saline Ettore e Infersa with the embarcation for the Lagoon of Stagnone and the island of Mothia.
Evocation
2019–2015
Series of projects on architecture as a sacred dimension, conjuring memories, emotions and cultural references. These projects draw inspiration from music and cinema, resonating with nostalgia, symbolism and a connection with the depths of the human psyche
Dessau Institute of Architecture, 13 November 2019
These works explore the idea of a sacred universe, where cultures and civilisations, ancient and recent, come together in singularities that tell of how the Psyche has diversified and projected its contents in the different eras and different places of the world.
Royal College of Art, 22 January 2019
According to Jung, the alchemical process of the philosopher’s stone that led to gold was the unconscious projection of an instance of spiritual and therefore psychological transformation. After the acquisitions of the Depth Psychology we can therefore reread and reinterpret the phenomenology of the sacred in a different way. This content is not exclusively about religion, but comes from the Psyche trying to project its hidden content into an external sensitive space.
Rome, 21 June 2018
The nightclub renamed ‘Anima Restaurant and Club’ in Casal Bertone with golden rough plaster vault and black iconostasis with arches.
Berlin, 1 April 2017
If you have power, you can influence other people. If you love, you destroy yourself. From a psychological point of view, love is a very dangerous disease. Love is merely an illusion. Just like architecture: merely an illusion! But at the same time, love is more real than reality.
New York, 1 September 2016
My youth was populated with symbols which came from an ancient past. My imagination was also moulded by the desires of people that inhabited the island long time ago. I think Sicily is more syncretic than eclectic. Since Greek colonization, the island society was an idiosyncratic representation of the complexity of the ancient world, a blend of far away cultures. I think that such a Dionysian setting specifically influenced my personal way to interpreting the classical epoch.
Trapani, 27 August 2016
The oratory Sala Laurentina of the Cattedrale di San Lorenzo with green archway, pink rough plaster and silver rectangle of limestone.
Berlin, 26 March 2015
Each act of beauty is a gentle message toward death. Any act of beauty is a shard of love en route for a stranger. Any fragment of past beautiness is part of our memory, giving sense to the permanence of the mankind on the Earth. Thus references can become testimonials of love, beyond the death.
London, 13 September 2014
Series of seven sculptures which relate the arch to the phallus part of the LDF exhibition Space and Light at Sir John Soane’s Museum
Ancestral images
2017–2013
Series of projects on architecture as a representation of archetypes, investigating colour as a narrative of the primordial. These projects weave hues and textures into spatial compositions that refer to ancient rituals, mythologies and collective memory
STATION-Berlin, 23 November 2017
The ‘words’ Vault, Grotto and Arch still inhabit our imagination. They embody archetypes that still move us today. According to Heidegger, “language is the house of the Being”, so, its happening in time could reveal to us the hidden structure of that historicity that it makes possible. The ‘words’ Vault, Grotto, Arch happen in the exercise of the psychological function of Sensation: that possibility of transfiguring the experience that we make in the world, through our body, in architecture.
London, 26 April 2015
The perfume shop Illuminum on Dover Street in Mayfair ward with grey rough plaster grotto and silk carpet plus olfactory glass bowls.
Rome, 29 April 2014
The Mondrian Suite art gallery on Via dei Piceni in Rione San Lorenzo with golden green rough plaster and arched mirror altar with black trumpets lamps.
AA School, 18 November 2013
I work alone. At a bench overlooking a valley; biding my time in the streets. Elsewhere, in a park, listening to the rippling waters of a fountain late at night; searching for feelings. Crawling toward the places where architecture lies asleep. Architecture is an idea and ideas are tardy; they are waiting for you on a lazy afternoon, wandering somewhere.
Rome, 16 April 2013
The apartment near to Via Veneto and Villa Borghese, with brown rough plaster and series of pink arched doors.
Rome, 16 April 2013
Architecture is dust.
Dust that becomes form,
Dust transfigured by the mind.
Wallpaper
2015–2007
Series of projects on architecture as an insertion, challenging conventional notions of surface and ornament. These projects where the walls become protagonists treat the surfaces as paintings, blurring the line between architecture and art
Deutsche Architekturmuseum, 1 December 2015
Since we cannot physically experience the world as a whole, despite the fact that we modern Westerners are still being raised under this false expectation, we end up believing an idea of reality derived from history books and journalism. So, what we are used to defining reality, is not reality itself, but a representation of information that we have acquired from surrogate experiences.
London, 6 September 2011
The commissioned by Wallpaper* editor-at-large Suzanne Trocmé London Design Festival entrance to the Victoria & Albert Museum exhibition ‘Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970–90’.
Takarazuka, 19 February 2011
A two-level wooden residential building on a trapezoidal plot commissioned by construction company Nomura Koumuten overlooking Osaka Bay.
Milan, 15 April 2010
The commissioned by Wallpaper* editor-at-large Suzanne Trocmé Sergio Rossi shoe store in Brera district with blue background, grey carpet, timber frame enclosure, fluorescent tubes and Joe Colombo’s lamps.
Berlin-Rotterdam, 6 April 2009
The Wallpaper* architects directory model house exhibited in the Berlin Neues Museum and the Rotterdam Chabot Museum, with vault, courtyard and golden plaster.
Remote places
2011–2007
Series of projects on architecture as concealed or simulated reality, expanding the boundaries of the imagination. These projects defy gravity, logic and context, inviting us to question our perception of space and place
Wuppertal, 1 October 2011
I believe in elegance, but not luxury. I think they are two opposing visions. Elegance is the visual manifestation of a personal state of quest. Pursuing it is vain. It is just the external result of an interior elaboration. Ascetics, artists, those curious about life are elegant. Luxury is bought and sold, it is an apparent shortcut that reveals itself—to keen eyes—as a tragic parody of elegance. Luxurious architecture, therefore, is an oxymoron.
Pembrokeshire, 1 June 2011
The seventh instalment in the ‘For No One’ collection, this expressionistic abode of sculpture embarks on a voyage into the legacy of the Normans. It engages with light to manipulate perception, offering an exploration of history.
Wuppertal, 1 August 2010
When I was 17 I came across this phrase: “Italy without Sicily leaves no image in the soul: here is the key to everything.” Goethe wrote it on 13 April, 1787 in his Sicilian travel diary during his stay in Palermo. For years I have tried to understand the reason for such a neat yet at times surprising affirmation. I was walking in my native Palermo searching for a sense of all that pain, looking for the reason for that dying beauty. Unlike other cities which boast cleanliness and order, Palermo seems forcibly to demand what is the ultimate sense of time, the sense of history. In Palermo I breathed possible futures which never materialised, futures which remained on the contrary latent in stones, in the ground and in bodies.
Istanbul, 1 August 2009
Architecture fascinates when it contains in itself ‘remote places’, where the separation, rather than physical, becomes an expression of the unknown, of the unreal, in short of dreams. The distance stimulates in everyone unexpected associations that, mutating the original nature of the building via a slow sedimentation in the collective memory, determine its representation in history.
Melbourne, 1 May 2009
The sixth instalment in the ‘For No One’ collection, this architectural project embarks on a journey into the ruins of ancient Rome. It engages with light to manipulate perception, proposing an exploration of the progressive mutation of contemporary ideas and those of late antiquity.
New Delhi, 1 February 2009
It is probable that places without names do not exist although memory is more truthful than physical space. Perhaps it is more real, and reality, therefore, is not merely physical space. But the memory of a historic city, as opposed to the ‘illusory’ one of Las Vegas, is, thus, also manipulation and alteration. Maybe the city is a gigantic pack of cards, a corrupt deck, and if history were linear, clear and intelligible, the art within it would have no reason to exist. Beauty always has a bastard quality and sometimes the most profound, the truest art lies in the distortion of reality.
Melbourne, 1 November 2008
The fifth instalment in the ‘For No One’ collection, this dwelling embarks on a voyage into the realm of fear and unconfessed desires. It engages with light to manipulate perception, proposing an exploration of diverse formal identities.
Nimes, 1 July 2008
The fourth instalment in the ‘For No One’ collection, this lakeside retreat embarks on a journey into the unpredictability of reality. It engages with light to manipulate perception, proposing an exploration of the transfiguration of a boat set against the wooded banks of a little lake.
Barcelona, 1 March 2008
The third instalment in the ‘For No One’ collection, this structure embarks on a voyage into the realm of transition and movement. It engages with light to manipulate perception, proposing an exploration of the changing colours of the celestial hemisphere.
Parma, 1 January 2008
The second instalment in the ‘For No One’ collection, this tower-like dwelling embarks on a journey into the realm of silence and sound. It engages with light to manipulate perception, proposing an exploration of the mutable architecture articulated by the passing time.
Rome, 1 November 2007
The Egyptian obsession with stopping time, recording in the memory, projecting onto stone the images of a reality actually experienced or desired—life beyond death—, is quite astonishing. Whether or not Egyptians were aware of it, here History was undoubtedly born. But its opposite was also born, namely the possibility of changing the truth by re-writing history.
Mumbai, 1 October 2007
In some way, it is like a return to a primitive state. The main focus in Ellipse is on the ever-changing light of the sky. This building is made like an astral observatory in which its walls record the changing weather. Like music, this aesthetic experience is obtained by the passage of time.
Rome, 25 March 2007
The first instalment in the ‘For No One’ collection, this elliptical tower embarks on a voyage into the realm of geometry and light. It engages with light to manipulate perception, proposing an exploration of the mutable architecture and its relationship with the changing sky.
