The internationally renowned Italian
architect Massimiliano Fuksas turns 80 on Tuesday with more than
600 completed projects to his name, others underway and his eyes
firmly planted on the future.
"I'm a nomad, my country is the world," he tells ANSA in a
telephone interview from his Rome-based studio led together with
his architect wife Doriana, but which also has branches in
France, China and Saudi Arabia.
"What am I missing? Maybe just designing a whole city, but I'm
working on it," he added.
The Rome-born 'archistar' of Lithuanian descent and La Sapienza
graduate is currently participating in The Line, a futuristic
'vertical' city in Saudi Arabia stretching 170 km from the
mountainous province of Tabuk across desert valleys to the Red
Sea.
His eclectic portfolio includes residential buildings, towers,
skyscrapers, shopping centres, cultural and religious spaces,
museums, airports, schools, designed and built all over the
world.
In Italy he is perhaps best known for the new trade fair centre
in Milan and the congress centre known as 'The Cloud' in Rome's
southern EUR district.
Each project is accompanied by a memory, an anecdote, a film
quote
- "To make good architecture you have to go and see good films,"
he told ANSA - an intuition often had years previously and
rooted in ideas of light, emotion, freedom, the future,
community.
"But if I am asked what my favourite project is, I answer that
it is the one still to come, because architects never reckon
with the past, they reckon with the future," he said, pointing
to the challenges presented by collective living and
globalisation, migration, the housing emergency, the "sublime"
chaos of the new megacities, the landscape, health and ethics,
to quote the title he chose in 2000 for his architecture
biennial "Cities: Less Aesthetics, More Ethics".
Italy, Fuksas insists, needs "a Marshall plan for housing".
"We must demolish and rebuild, we must have courage and
intelligence," he said.
However, for now his attention is focused on The Line, with a
commission to create three modules in the city designed to
accommodate nine million people by 2030.
It is an "extraordinary idea, a vertical city full of services
and greenery, with no cars and no traffic, with parks built as
high as 100 m," he enthused.
His is the only Italian firm and his wife Doriana the only
female architect involved in the project.
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