Research
Settlement Sustainability
It is the ability of architecture to react to places by transforming them. The settlement landscape, in its complexity, becomes the reference: geography, the history of places, the environment with its contradictions, morphological and altimetric features of the soil are taken as generative elements of the project.
Poetic Identity
Architecture is a formal exploration that integrates place, volume, space, construction, material, and light. These factors are intrinsically integrated and therefore inseparable. The project's effort is closely connected to this ability to make them meaningful.
Public space
The city is the space of the public, where everyone gives up part of their freedom to live in common. That's why our projects refer to increasingly collective, inclusive, and resilient spatialities.
Sociality
Rules establish the terms for collective life, but people come together in space, and space contributes to shape and transform the established social contract. Good architecture is "appropriate" when it contributes to cultivating a sense of community and belonging among those who inhabit it.
Interview
Belonging influences lifestyle and a way of looking at reality that allows a dimension still directly relational, can positively change the ability to approach the project. We could consider ourselves "glocal," working locally while engaging with an international horizon in which we constantly travel.
Seven questions for ARW
curated by LIST lab
This interview is part of the volume titled
“Architectural Research Workshop – Architetture e progetti”
published by LIST lab
LISI lab
Does your decision to work in Brescia, along the vast metropolis-megalopolis of the Po Valley, influence your project choices? What relationship do you have with your city and the context in which you live?
ARW
Belonging influences lifestyle and a way of looking at reality which, without a directly relational dimension, can positively alter the ability to approach the project. We might consider ourselves “glocal”; we work locally while engaging with an international horizon we constantly travel within.
LISI lab
What have been the constant references in your work and your visual and formal universe? Does your culture as contemporary designers lean more towards rethought tradition or towards choices that go beyond and others?
ARW
Regardless of the different education obtained by both after the Polytechnic University of Milan, one on the Italian side and the other French, there is a common interest in the research developed in the last 30 years in the Iberian Peninsula regarding attention to the landscape interpreted in a contemporary key, towards a tendency for synthesis, towards the necessity of an architecture that is at the same time intense, sensual, and material.
LISI lab
Today, the crisis has selected values, ideas, themes, and models. How do you position yourselves in the scenario of Italian project production and in the international one?
ARW
Our research finds some affinities in the Italian landscape, in the sense that while looking at the more experimental European production, we interpret it with an Italian specificity that is non-traditionalist. This means that we believe it to be classical without classicism, assertive, rooted in places, experimental without formal exhibitionism.
LISI lab
There is another interesting aspect of your work that we appreciate and for which we have always advocated a cultural “battle”: the coherence between architecture and internal process. Often, in the prevalence of one over the other, precious elements for significant quality and unity are lost. What do you attribute this coherence process to and how do you achieve it?
ARW
Architecture is a process that integrates place, volume, space, construction, material, and light. These factors are intrinsically integrated and therefore inseparable. The project’s effort is closely linked to this ability to make them meaningful.
LISI lab
If you had to make a choice among your architectures, which ones represent you the most?
ARW
In the latest completed work, a small residential intervention on Lake Iseo, our previous lines of research converge, referring to the Alps Villa and the project for the technical center of Rixheim.
This house, for example, which, with its claw-like form, could be defined as a poetic and programmatic manifesto for the attention to the landscape that becomes the material structuring the form, where the volumetric characterization finds a principle of formal complexity generated by the relationships with the places to which it relates. Thus, the construction combines advanced industrialized systems and craftsmanship, defining the building’s character between the archetypal nature of the layout and the contemporaneity of the adopted language.