The accidental architect

ROME: Unpredictable, iconic, visionary, radical, sublime are just some of the words he is normally labelled with but to Massimiliano Fuksas he is just an accidental architect.

“I became an architect because my mother was afraid I would become an artist and to her artists were people who never had money,” said Fuksas. The 67-year-old, debonair architect’s mother need not worry about her son not making any money. Fuksas has been creating waves in the world of architecture now for over 35 years and dismisses money, of which he has quite a bit, by saying “What is the point of struggling to earn more and more money to gain more power? My dream is that everyone can have ideas, passions and feelings”.

“I believe artists, even the worst ones are better than architects because artists always start from a vision, architects never speaks about visions, they always speak about projects,” said Fuksas. But his latest project the New Milan Trade Fair, Fiera Milano designed with a mile long exhibition hall ‘draped in glass and steel as if it were a fabric’ has been described as a masterpiece. Fuksas calls it part of a “family of projects of great dimension which are the cathedrals of a new society”.

The Milan complex is based in the city’s suburbs, an area to which Fuksas attaches huge importance too and has specialises. “The real city today is the suburbs. The central city is like the suburbs used to be. The suburbs are more complex, because there is infrastructure, housing and work places,” he expands.

“The biggest challenge is how to deal with a world of six billion people, many of whom are moving every day from rural areas to cities,” he adds.

Born in Rome of a Lithuanian father and a Roman mother who had a German parent, Fuksas sees himself as a citizen of world, devoid of parochial nationalist feelings. “After two weeks of living in Rome, people are Roman. You can see this in the priests, cardinals and bishops who here come from all over the world,” he says.

Romans however talk of him with pride as one of their own, and are extremely excited that he has undertaken the new Congress Centre Italia in their city. For this Fuksas has planned a large 30 metre tall translucent container, inside which will be 3500 sqm steel and teflon cloud suspended above a surface of 10,000 sqm. This will hold a 1,800 people auditorium with other meeting rooms.

“My real obsession is with landscapes. I never look at architecture for inspiration. I look at art, movies, forests, dunes and I have always been fascinated by the beauty of the absence of form,” he explains. “I have asked myself how is it possible to create a form of architecture with no shape and with no geometrical or complex dimensions,” adds Fuksas. The Congress Centre due for completion next year is an endeavour with this aim.

Commuting between his homes in Paris and Rome, Fuksas has projects around the world and is a stickler for deadlines. “We need to be fast because we always need fresh concepts and not ideas that quickly become boring,” he explains.

Fuksas may have very dogmatic views of how one should work, “without plans at the beginning, start with concepts”, and work away from preconceived notions of what an office block or a conference centre should look like, but one thing his work is not and that is boring.