Brilliant designs illuminate cities worldwide
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| Massimiliano Fuksas is one of Italy's foremost architects of the modern era |
The international architect Massimiliano Fuksas, whose work
has influenced the urban landscape in more than a dozen countries across the
globe, was born on this day in 1944 in Rome.
The winner of multiple awards, Fuksas sits alongside Antonio
Citterio and Renzo Piano as the most important figures in contemporary Italian
architectural design.
His Fuksas Design company, which has its headquarters in a
Renaissance palace near Piazza Navona in Rome, also has offices in Paris and in
Shenzhen, China, employing 140 staff.
Among more than 600 projects completed by the company in 40
years, those that stand out include Terminal Three at the Shenzhen Bao’an
International Airport in China, the New National Archives of France at
Pierrefitte sur Seine-Saint Denis, the Peres Peace House in Tel Aviv, the Zenith Music Hall in Strasbourg, the Armani Ginza Tower in Tokyo, the Italian
Space Agency headquarters in Rome and the FieraMilano Trade Fair complex on the
outskirts of Milan.
Ongoing projects include the new EUR Hotel and Conference
Centre in Rome, the Duomo metro station in Naples, the Australia Forum centre
in Canberra, Australia and the Rhike Park music theatre and museum complex in
Tbilisi, Georgia.
Fuksas, who had a Lithuanian father and an Italian mother of
Austrian heritage, wanted to be an artist and in the early 1960s would work in
the studio of the painter Giorgio de Chirico, who had been the founder of the Scuola
Metafisica in Italian art in the early part of the century, which had similarities
with the Surrealism movement that emerged in Paris at around the same time.
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| Fuksas's Zenith Music Hall in Strasbourg resembles a giant paper lantern |
He spent time in London with Archigram, a group of
avant-garde architects, and also visited Copenhagen before returning to Rome to
enrol at Sapienza University, where he graduated in architecture in 1969.
Setting up a studio with his first wife, Anna Maria Sacconi,
in the 1970s he worked on many public sector projects in Lazio, particularly in
the towns of Anagni and Paliano.
Fuksas’s reputation began to grow after a leading architecture
magazine in France ran a feature about his municipal gymnasium project in
Paliano, famous for a façade that appears to have become detached from the main
building and leans at a seemingly precarious angle. It led him to be invited to exhibit at the
Paris Biennial of 1982.
Since 1985 he has shared a professional as well as personal relationship
with Doriana Mandrelli, a designer from Rome who graduated from Sapienza
University in 1979. She became his second wife and is the mother of his three daughters,
Elisa, Lavinia and Priscilla.
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| The FieraMilano site is notable for its undulating mesh roof |
By the 1990s, major international projects were keeping
Fuksas continuously busy, including the Twin Tower office and residential
development in Vienna, the Europark retail complex in Salzburg and the
modernisation of the PalaLottomatica sports venue in Rome’s EUR district.
In 2004, the new headquarters and research centre for
Ferrari at Maranello in Emilia-Romagna and the Nardini Research Centre at
Bassano del Grappa in the Veneto were completed, followed the following year by
the FieraMilano site between the suburbs of Rho and Pero.
With Doriana running the business, a lucrative deal was
struck with Armani to revamp some stores and construct new ones, among the most
eye-catching being the Armani Ginza Tower in Tokyo.
Although he has moved away from the bizarre and
surrealistic, into which category the façade of the Paliano gymnasium fell,
Fuksas still wanted his buildings to have a bold visual impact and would use
conventional materials to create unusual effects.
For example, he wanted the roof of the FieraMilano to
resemble draped cloth and achieved this with an undulating mesh of steel and glass.
With the circular Zenith Music Hall in
Strasbourg, the use of an irregular steel frame covered with a translucent textile
membrane creates the impression, especially at night, of a giant lantern.
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| The terminal Fuksas designed for Shenzen Bao'an International airport in China |
The airport terminal in Shenzen, which Fuksas designed after
winning a competition from a field that included the British architectural star
Sir Norman – now Lord – Foster, itself resembles the frame of an aeroplane.
Fuksas and his family divide their time between homes in Rome,
where they have a substantial apartment overlooking Castel Sant’Angelo, and in
Paris, where their residence is on the fashionable Place de Vogues in the
Marais neighbourhood.
Unlike some architects obsessed with modernity, Fuksas is
respectful of history. In fact, he says
he would do nothing with the traditional historic centres of Italian cities
except turn them into clean and airy pedestrian zones, empty of traffic except
for metro trains and non-polluting buses and trams, beginning with Rome and
Naples.
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| Fuksas's design for the facade of a gymnasium complex in the town of Paliano was bizarre but drew attention |
Travel tip:
The medieval hill town of Anagni, full of steep, narrow
streets offering shade from the summer sun, used to be popular with Roman
emperors as a cooler, fresher place to which to retreat from the oppressive
heat of the summer. It also produced
four popes, all from the Conti family. Paliano
is among the smaller, neighbouring towns and villages.
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| Rome's cylindrical Castel Sant' Angelo seen across the bridge over the Tiber river |
Travel tip:
Once the tallest building in Rome, the distinctively
cylindrical Castel Sant’Angelo was originally commissioned by the Emperor
Hadrian to be built on the right bank of the Tiber as a mausoleum for him and
his family, although it was later used by the popes as a fortress and castle. An urn containing Hadrian's ashes was placed there
a year after his death in 138, together with those of his wife Sabina, and his
first adopted son, Lucius Aelius. The remains of subsequent emperors were also
placed there, the last recorded deposition being Caracalla in 217, although
after the building’s conversion to military use it became a target for Visigoth
looters in the fifth century and most of the urns were destroyed and their contents
randomly scattered.