Abruptarhitectura - The construction site in the studio

Lately we are haunted by the ghost of the memory room. Most everything around us seems to be ceaselessly settling and rearranging itself into fragile collections of fragments, by piecing them together we try to learn something of a larger meaning that otherwise often eludes us. This way of working needs nothing more than a pretext to weave a whole history. Past time is insufficient to ground a continuity, everything is still too fickle, and yet too pretentious, say the logical arguments. So it is after all. This article I'd fill just like a memory room. Or like a construction site shed.

The Gârda project, the "Glacier Community Center", is one of the first projects we worked on together. It was a competition project, won, but never built. So far. Sometimes we hope. Something tells us it's a living project still, actual, possible.

Indeed, probably since then, probably since 2008, with this project, a question began to take shape: how can you make an architecture that is not so much "www", but rather an architecture that tries to capture and settle not only in a place, but also in a continuity of a way of building, of living. Over the years we have worked under the same impulse, and in the projects that are most important to us we find, in a way, a similar spirit to that of Gârda.

Some of these projects were built, others, perhaps most of them, were not. For us this is the construction site and workshop of a way of making architecture that suits us and does not clash with the world around us and with others, those who need our houses and our supposed skill. We call it appropriateness, fit, with the place, the means, the people, the theme, the nature of the question that opens before us, and the happenings and encounters along the way.

Read the full text in issue 1 / 2015 of Arhitectura Magazine