On Continuity

By Fabrizio Barozzi - 2 September 2024

Part I

We arrived in Barcelona, where we now live and work, in 2004, on the back of a series of circumstances, which although unplanned were to a certain extent sought after, establishing the firm while still looking for a place to settle. Our academic backgrounds were different, and in Barcelona, we were completely new to the city’s architectural scene. Yet, those early years to a large extent shaped the type of architects we are today. The lack of small, direct local commissions – the kind that would have helped establish the office – encouraged us to work internationally right from the start. As a result, our work in those first years developed quite independently from the context we lived and worked in, a fact that probably influenced the sort of architecture we produce. Our work was therefore not so much influenced by the local context as by what we had learned at the school of architecture and certain key experiences during those formative years. In fact, what we do, what everyone achieves, comes from afar. Every architect has their own story, an intimate, deeply personal narrative. No project begins when we start to sketch; it first springs from that time when we first became aware of architecture. In my case, I think I realized I wanted to be an architect when I saw Casa Malaparte.

I remember exactly when – at the age of 12 – I first discovered Casa Malaparte. I was completely fascinated. It was a total surprise to discover that Adalberto Libera, an architect from my city in the Italian Dolomites had built an extraordinary house on a distant island in the Mediterranean, to me almost a foreign country. Built almost by chance, Casa Malaparte was the first work of modern architecture to fascinate me, remaining with me for many years. Indeed, I admit that there is a lot of Casa Malaparte in our own work. When I started seeing this building with the eyes of an architect, I realized that what surprised me was the relationship that simple and elementary forms were able to establish with the place – a beautiful but harsh environment – and the magnificent contrast they could create between nature and the artifice of architecture, which nonetheless settled into its natural setting, acquiring a metaphysical dimension. I was surprised to see how in some of the early drawings by Libera – or perhaps by Malaparte, his authorship remains uncertain – extremely elementary forms were transformed by an apparently foreign element – a staircase – into architecture capable of revealing a new world and unveiling a new, unexpected aspect of the context. An image indicating the very essence of the Casa Malaparte project has remained with me. It is a photograph of Curzio Malaparte – author of The Skin, and client of the project – in front of the stairs of the Annunziata Church in Lipari, one of the Aeolian Islands. This basic architectural element was transformed when integrated into Casa Malaparte. In fact, although never proven, I believe that Malaparte and Libera worked with the traditional features of the islands.

I have always been fascinated and excited to see how simple, traditional objects belonging to a particular cultural tradition can take on mysterious, enigmatic architectural forms and how, with a few schematic strokes, these primary elements can establish a profound dialogue with a specific context and with the components that identify a particular place. This led me to discover how the association of three features: primary forms, interpreting the uniqueness of a place, and the inclusion in a given context of a foreign element – a traditional feature or intimate memory of the client, in this case an author – can together create architecture. I was astounded to see how fitted into elementary volumes, a staircase – here an apparently foreign, and to some extent, useless item – can become the cardinal element of a whole project, the feature lending a building its raison d’être. It is precisely this element, foreign to the place itself, that paradoxically links the project to the landscape. Although not clear to me at first, over the years, and especially in recent years, I have gradually discovered the profound influence that, maybe subconsciously, the Casa Malaparte project has had on our work.

Scuola di Musica, Brunico (BZ), 2018 ©Simon Menges, courtesy Barozzi Vega

Part II

Examining our projects, we realize that this lesson became a sort of working method, a way of defining an expressive language. We often steal elements we find and integrate them into new architectures. No project ever really stands by itself; rather it is accompanied by something that existed before that constitutes its foundation. The dialogue between what was there before and what will be there in the future is always present in our architecture.

In a certain sense, all these reflections are summed up in our first book Barozzi Veiga (2022), more precisely in the preface entitled “A Sentimental Monumentality”, which is a sort of manifesto of our work. We describe the fundamental dichotomy that has guided what we do: the search for a balance between the specificity of a place and the autonomy of architectural form. All our projects relate to this concept. An oxymoron, the title also reveals the paradox that animates our work: the essential dialogue between contextualization and abstraction. The word “sentimental” refers to the need for a certain empathy for the character and unique condition of a place, while “monumental” addresses an awareness of the inevitable autonomy and solitude of the architectural object.

This text was subsequently transformed into an installation at the Venice Biennale, an artwork that physically expressed the concept of the architectural project described in the text: a site-specific installation in the middle of the Corderie that reinterpreted the identifying element of that space – the column. It simply added a new archetypal element to the infinite series that already existed. Although belonging to the specificity of the place and, at the same time, precisely because it defined an archetypal element, the installation was an alien object and it attempted to explain how a project arises from a given context only to take on a life of its own.

This way of working has an intimate and direct relationship with what was discussed previously: reflecting on the specificity of place and its interpretation; how to highlight the unique characteristics and identities of different places, not directly, but unexpectedly, as in the case of Casa Malaparte. We could say that our work proceeds by analogy: analogies with the physical reality of a place, but also with the architectural vocabulary of a place, its character, and intrinsic elements. But sometimes working by analogies goes beyond the physicality of a place to refer to the history of the discipline and its historical precedents. In the Bündner Kunstmuseum Chur project, for example, there is a direct relationship with an ideal like the Palladian Rotonda. At other times, it becomes urban forms. In the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne, there is a distilled, quite subtle analogy with the Uffizi and the Roman Forum, a reference that makes possible a dilution of the boundary between architecture and public space, thereby defining the project as a collegial, public, or civic space not just a simple architectural object.

In recent years as we proceeded with this process, we began to realize that our work was essentially the search for a certain idea of continuity with places and existing architecture, in other words, continuity with a specific history. In fact, recently, our first monographic exhibition, opened at the University of Architecture in Venice – the University where I studied – and afterwards traveling to Milan and then Budweis (Czech Republic), is titled On Continuity. The very title questions the meaning of the word “continuity” in architecture. For us, it means interpreting the specificities of a place, the different realities that exist and, consequently, understanding its specific tradition and how to work with it. In the book I mentioned earlier, we inserted an important quote from Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (1970): “The old has refuge only at the vanguard of the new: in the gaps, not in continuity”. For years, we kept that sentence in mind. It posits that the idea of tradition is not perpetuated in continuity but rather that the ancient – tradition – takes refuge in the interstice. And it is precisely this interstice that interests us, becoming the way we interpret the idea of tradition. Paradoxically, to work in continuity with a tradition, and therefore with the specificity of a place, there must be an interstice. And it is precisely this interstice that we seek out in our work. The interstice is what is generated when a tradition element belonging to a particular place or landscape becomes something else and reveals a new and unexpected meaning of a place. An interstice could be, for example, the staircase at Casa Malaparte.

This approach is important since we believe that today we must consider how to preserve the essence of places, reject their homogenization, and interpret and emphasize their differences. In other words, how we can adapt, transform and renovate objects. To preserve does not simply mean to conserve, but to work in that interstitial space, that fragment of space that I have just described, for it is in that interstitial space that the unexpected is to be found. For us, preserving difference and the unique character of each place is a priority. This could be described as working with the contingencies of a situation, always seeking a balance between history and innovation. For us, the avant-garde aspect of some works lies in the search for the boundary between philological continuity and personal interpretation.

I think that our work clearly shows these intentions. Our first building, the Ribera del Duero Regulatory Council headquarters in Roa (Spain), creates an intimate relationship with the place, a dialogue with the features but especially with the atmosphere of the landscape. The Roa project has certain aspects that have become constant features in our work, among which a sense of permanence in its setting, or striking the right tone so that the architecture becomes a natural part of the landscape. It also represents our striving to build a microcosm: an urban and civic space where architecture is just the framework for public life.

Sede Ribera del Duero, Roa, Spagna, 2011 ©Simon Menges, courtesy Barozzi Vega

Our research during those early years crystallized in the Szczecin Philharmonic Hall (Poland). The Philharmonic creates a certain tension with the context, seeking to be part of the city but also revealing another possible reality. The building’s civic role is expressed by incorporating a public square – the foyer – inside the building. Another feature present in all our projects is the home: it gives shape to civic and public architecture where the architectural object simply provides the framework for a prominent collective space. The main hall, on the other hand, shows a continuity with history and how we exploit its infinite capacity to produce new themes. The 2008 residential project in Ordos (China) can be considered the continuation of the Szczecin design process. It explores the link between the ideal matrix of a tradition and its limits.

The Neanderthal Museum in Piloña in northern Spain marked an important turning point in the firm’s research. The effect of working in a natural environment for the first time led to a primary form, a basic state. It also furthered our interest in the process of paring and stripping a form of the superfluous in order to return a construct to its origins.

This elementary composition, along with the density of the materials and the expressiveness of the interior space would then become the main themes of our subsequent projects in Switzerland. We were just over 30 years old when we started Lausanne’s Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts (MCBA). The project gives shape to the civic ambition that has motivated our work from the beginning. It highlights the centrality of public space as a link with the city but also dialogues cogently with the uniqueness of the site, preserving its former industrial character. At the same time, the MCBA expresses a certain degree of abstraction and autonomy. Although interpreting an urban situation, its character, and specificity, it also testifies to an awareness of being an object unto itself, an awareness that spilled over into the Bündner Kunstmuseum, undertaken nine months after Lausanne. Even if this project references the historic Palladian villa and its romantic orientalism, it displays an assertive autonomy our work had never expressed before. Indeed, the search for the ideal, almost Platonic, architectural object has become a major theme of our research. These ideas were then quickly radicalized in the Tanzhaus Zürich. While the interpretation of the building as a public infrastructure was informed by the existing context, its experimental, pioneering and radical constructive logic testifies to our new awareness of the value and primary condition of architecture as an object in space.

Museo Cantonale delle Belle Arti, Losanna, Svizzera, 2019 ©Simon Menges, courtesy Barozzi Vega

We were interested in the search for a certain sense of permanence, focusing on projects that aim to weave together time and history as a counterpoint to the ephemeral immateriality that today dominates the architectural scene. We sought to create architecture capable of expressing mass and gravitas appropriate to each context, even if, in some cases, this meant a certain necessary anonymity, as in the little music school in Bruneck (Italy). The Solo House of Matarraña (Spain) references our Swiss experience and the exploration of primitive, almost archaic forms, especially those of our Zürich projects. The project for the Guerrieri Rizzardi family, near Lake Garda (Italy), is in the same vein. The mission of Villa AK in Beirut broadened the firm’s geographical scope, extending our architectural proposals.

The Artists’ Ateliers in London and commercial headquarters in Tokyo, both located in unusual contexts – respectively evanescent and fragmented – have been paradigmatic of the firm’s approach since 2015. The site of the London project was a brownfield former industrial area largely devoid of any urban references and lacking a clearly defined program. We therefore adopted a loose, almost dream-like narrative that did not seek physical specificity but rather continuity with certain historical architectural precedents. We were faced with a similar situation with the Tokyo project. Although never built, the design gave us a greater understanding of specificity as we explored the needs of a brand identity project. The design was imbued with a certain radical sobriety that created a moment of silence amidst the urban noise. Its serenity and exquisite construction aligned with the clients’ wishes but also with the original values of the brand.

Atelier degli artisti, Londra, Regno Unito, 2021. ©Simon Menges, courtesy Barozzi Vega

This new working scenario is also visible in the 2017 commission to design the Art Institute of Chicago, a project we are still working on that will engage us for several years to come. Interestingly, although in an American urban context, the project’s strategy is deeply rooted in European architectural sensitivity and the attendant emphasis on the essential civic nature of all urban architecture. The artificial geography of Saint-Malo but also the material character of the old city resonates in the project for the Maritime History Museum, one of the few projects realized in France.

More recently, our museums in Aalborg (Denmark), Kortrijk (Belgium) and Brussels, similar in scale and context, show that a project must be part of a whole – whether city or natural landscape – and never conceived or perceived as a self-referential object. These projects are tangible examples of an “environmentalist” relationship, to use an expression of Ernesto Nathan Rogers.

For us, creating a coherent whole means aligning projects with their environment not only tangibly, or physically, but also intangibly, achieving “climatic” harmony with the surrounding environment and geographic location. An example is an ongoing project for an artist residency in Miami that seeks to find a new meeting point between climate sustainability and constructive logic by transforming technical elements into expressive architectural resources. Our work has of course evolved over the last 20 years. What has, however, remained unchanged is that our projects, like novels, tend to be based on an image, the memory of a moment, or certain feelings triggered by a fragment, the detail of a wall, the light characterizing a place, or time-worn materials. The essential character of a place is often found in certain unexpressed conditions – fragments, spaces, materials, atmospheres – which can be transformed and translated into new architectures and so preserve and even accentuate the identity of the original architecture and place.

Put another way, what interests us is the intrahistoria of a place, to quote Miguel de Unamuno, that “little story” that often becomes the starting point we seek for a project; not the major story, but a minor element that develops into a reality, a character, and an identity. For us, working in continuity means continuing these little stories that highlight the uniqueness of a place and express the intimate relationship with a site’s specificities so that the new architecture resonates with the original essence of the place.

At times we feel that our research takes its cue from a continuous, obsessive, even unconscious focus on images and lessons that marked out formative years when we discovered that simple, found objects allow some architecture to be at the boundary between belonging to a landscape and otherness. We have always been fascinated by that staircase that landed on an island from another place and opened up new horizons, which, although ever changing, always remain the same.