Our work takes place through “operative feelings”.
One of the operative feelings that we consider as foundational for our idea of architecture is the feeling of “generosity”.
The others are “wonder” and “dialogue”.
Our belief is that every architectural intervention is an intervention that is a bearer of public significance, and that the aim of every client, every designer, whatever the intervention or project, is that of giving, of giving of themselves.
The feeling of generosity, which we try to make become a concept, is considered as a theme and means for the creation of architecture: all architecture is public and expresses generosity, in such a way as to make beauty and pleasure feelings that can be shared.
Architecture can be a place of “objective correlatives” (the “cuttlefish bones”) insofar as it is formed by perceptual spatial events capable of rendering shared feelings, emotions and sentiments: dialogue is then the chiasm between these spatial events and collective shared feelings.
Beauty as a place of dialogue is the creation of architectures with these characteristics of generosity.
Beauty is the place where intimate and personal feelings meet collective emotion. It is thus possible to think that (public) architecture contributes to the building of a “secular religion” through this act of generosity and emotional sharing.
This obviously implies that generosity does not direct just positive feelings, in the sense that the creation of marvel can bring with it the sharing of a drama (the ardeatine caves, the cretto of gibellina, the church of longarone, the vietnam war memorial, the jewish museum in berlin): the oppression of the ardeatine caves, for example, its archaic brutality in counterpoint to the strength of its geometric simplicity, acts on the feeling of weight, of deep pain, of the total immanent drama and its redemption related to the fact of its existing and having taken shape.
Monument to the martyrs of the ardeatine caves, giuseppe perugini, n. Aprile, a. Cardelli, c. Calcaprina, m. Fiorentino, f. Coccia, m. Basaldella, rome 1944–46
the cretto of gibellina, a.burri, gibellina vecchia 1984–89
the church of longarone, g.michelucci, longarone 1975–83
vietnam veterans memorial, m. Lin, washington 1982
jüdisches museum, d. Libeskind, berlin 1999