When I started my carreer, more than twenty years ago, we used to look at the architecture of Switzerland, in particular the architecture of the Graubünden and of the South Tyrol. Even today, some of those buildings are stuck in our mind, just as the covers of some magazines that cannot be forgotten; one for all the number 648 of Casabella with the design of the baths of Vals by Peter Zumthor.
It was 1997. The first projects I made were inspired by those models and by the many trips I made in Switzerland and in Alto Adige had deluded me into the possibility of a sincere architecture. At least that's what I thought, also regarding that very influential book that was for me "Italian Rural Architecture" by Giuseppe Pagano.
Roberto Gabetti, in class, while talking about Aldo Rossi, used to say: "I do not love, but I respect". I have loved many architects and I learnt to love those far from my first certainties, so much that I no longer have any.Architecture is born from a place and from the people who live that place.
When I was discussing with Carlo Olmo about architecture he sometimes suggested me to look at them very carefully, because by observing them it was possible to perceive the intentions and aspirations of the designers, the clients and the builders. In some ways by looking at architecture you can discover the flaws and merits of a society. It was true. As it was also true that we are immersed in images without imaginary, and that architecture seems to be born more and more from trivial considerations to confirm clichés and old-fashioned rhetoric.
Today, looking at our cities and non-cities we can legitimately worry. In the projects I realized I tried to make sense of things, what was around me and what men built in that context.
The history is that thin breath that gave me the courage and guided me in my projects by pointing me out the right way to start to draw a line on a sheet that has never been white.