- interview

Your training is literary and philosophical, where does your passion for art come from?

FR: It is difficult to answer. When does a passion start? When is it recognized as such, then as a love or a necessity?

I started with reading. I read with joy and passion, with fury and greed. Then, at a certain point, when I started looking at works of art, attending galleries and museums, I first began to look for a correspondence with the images I had in my head, then to "read" the works of art, to explore them , to investigate in secret, because I think that every work of art questions us starting from the secret that it hides and that at the same time reveals, or at least makes its existence perceptible.

The cycle of conferences “Beyond the garden” focuses on the limits of our discipline.

How important is it for an architect who lives and works in the city to explore multidisciplinarity and consequently look from “multiple points of view”?

FR: I believe that architecture constructs the work as a point of consistency around which and upon which various practices affect, and not only those of an inevitably technical nature, but also criticism, philosophy, aesthetics, and even narrative. . The architectural work in its making is therefore structurally open to the various disciplines that necessarily affect it. This is what I said in the seminar, “The project as an open work”, and what I feel I can strongly reaffirm. The architect must be a hybrid: an artist who also delves into matter, as painters once did. He builds the space in which he projects his desires, but which will be inhabited above all by the desires of his clients, or even - if it is a public work - by the myriad of clients who are the inhabitants of public spaces.

A burden and a responsibility. But also a profound sense of one's doing.

You taught Aesthetics at the IUAV in Venice. What value could this discipline have in today's Faculties of Architecture?

FR: In my opinion an immense value. Aesthetics is the study of forms.

It is a philosophical study that in my opinion has even more legitimacy in architecture than in philosophy. Because the very meaning of our work, of the forms we give to things and to the world, is a primary task for the architect.

Paradoxically, architecture, precisely with its being, marks and determines space and time in a changing way. It proposes a profile that also irrevocably draws not only what is close to it, not only its “inside”, but in some way its “outside”, that is to say the whole outside, potentially the whole world. The hand that drew the signs, which became a home, also established a relationship with the past - the site, its history, its nature - to project itself into the future, in a time when that hand has long since ceased. to mark on paper the map of a multiple set of requests, needs and desires.

On April 6th he presented his new book “Manet's secret” at the Feltrinelli bookshop in Pescara. What secret of Manet would you leave us students?

FR: Manet's paintings disturbed me, so much so that at a certain point I had to try to penetrate them more deeply. My advice for you students is to be intrigued, to be disturbed, to be questioned by the works of painting, poetry, architecture.

Interview by Chiara Sileno for WOO_mezzometroquadro.

We thank Franco Rella for his immense availability.