Threshold of twilight
2023–2021
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
Castiglione delle Stiviere, 12 October 2023
Villa near to Lake Garda
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
Apartment near the train station
Marsala, 16 May 2021
Saline Ettore e Infersa wharf for the Motya island
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
Off Club restaurant/bar at 64 Casal Bertone
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
Oratory of the Cattedrale di San Lorenzo
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.
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
Illuminum Fragrance gallery at 41 Dover Street
Rome, 29 April 2014
Mondrian Suite art gallery at 41 Piceni
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
Apartment in Ludovisi ward
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
LDF dedicated entrance to the Victoria & Albert Museum
Takarazuka, 19 February 2011
House on two levels overlooking the Osaka bay
Milan, 15 April 2010
Sergio Rossi store at 17 Ponte Vetero
Berlin, 6 April 2009
House for the Wallpaper* architects directory at the Neues Museum
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
Dwelling on three levels in Pembrokeshire
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
Dwelling on three levels in the suburb of Kew
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
Dwelling on three levels in the suburb of Kew
Nimes, 1 July 2008
Dwelling on two levels in the countryside
Barcelona, 1 March 2008
Dwelling on two levels in the countryside
Parma, 1 January 2008
Dwelling on two levels in Felino’s countryside
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
Dwelling on two levels in the countryside
