Studio Fuksas has a dual identity. Since 1985, Massimiliano and his wife and business partner Doriana have conceived every project together, so it’s difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish separate contributions.
Massimiliano Fuksas says that he does not have a style, but from the beginning he displayed the same elegant ferocity in architecture that he demonstrated in his paintings.
However, technical advances in architecture, particularly computational tools, have allowed Massimiliano and Doriana to realize the passion more completely, to realize feelings explored and tested in the painted vision.
Both Massimiliano and Doriana started out in the orthogonal world, but even within that world there were intimations of a search for emotionally evocative buildings and an artistic sensibility. The concrete surfaces of the St Paolo church in Foligno, Italy, are brooding, and the angular windows are quizzical, allowing trapezoids of light to pierce and mysteriously wash the otherwise monolithic concrete walls.
One of Massimiliano and Doriana’s breakout buildings was the Nardini Research and Performance Centre of 2004, near Venice, where they built large enclosed glass capsules that are at once complex, sophisticated, and populist. The elevated pods might suggest the cartoonish work of Archigram, but a second look reveals the complex mix of form and spaces that creates an environmental turbulence rare in architecture, and increasingly characteristic of the work to come. The same visual commotion could more easily be found in a Jackson Pollock or de Kooning.
Massimiliano and Doriana Fuksas entered the curvilinear world with projects such as Nardini, and the geometric results were hypnotic; curves merging into curves and counter curves that in Italy, of course, echo the Baroque architecture especially important to Romans. One particularly pertinent but ignored precedent of Roman Baroque is the undulating roof of St. Peter’s Basilica, a seascape of waves ‘moving’ above the more controlled and importantly magisterial interiors. The roof, which was not really designed, expresses the interior vaults, and it edges out of control, toward wildness.
The St. Peter’s roof is an intriguing reference for the undulating roofs that float over a number of Studio Fuksas’ more recent projects, especially the Australia Forum, a new and expanded convention center in Canberra, Australia, that will include a hall, exhibition area, and ballroom, due to be finished in 2020. The roof undulates over the several floors and podium of the Forum with the floating grace of a stingray.
Studio Fuksas’ roofs are made feasible by the computer, but are anticipated by the commotion in Massimiliano’s paintings. In the New Milan Trade Fair, a long glass roof undulates over the project’s central spine, wafting through space, lighter than air. In Milan, Fuksas has the luxury of size to be able to put the same roof through ambitious paces, with unique moves in a range of forms that affect the floors beneath.
They drop worm holes of glass into the spaces below, creating exceptional, highly dramatic moments. Their space frame, with a grid stretched like a nylon fabric, is a far cry from the straight and stiff rational space frames of another era.
The roof may look carefree, but its successful execution demands technical virtuosity at the keyboard, and close collaboration with fabricators and contractors. As Massimiliano and Doriana gained expertise with increasingly ambitious projects, they seemed to grow more into himself, painting with the computer.
Many architects have built curving roofs over floor plans that are unaffected by the wavy forms above, such as the glass handkerchief floating above the new Islamic art win at The Louvre. Studio Fuksas’ contribution to the field is that with worm holes and other elasticized moments in the roof or walls bring the envelope into the more conventional fabric of the building, creating moments of experiential and aesthetic tension through the juxtaposition of forms?straight against curved lines, compression against expansion, dynamic against static. The section of the MyZeil is exceptionally rich, verging on what Rem Koolhaas would call the delirious. The New Rome EUR Convention Centre and Hotel was, at 592,015 square feet (55,000 square meters), so vast that the commission and program called for a conventional structure overall, and the architects worked with a highly disciplined orthogonal language, producing crisp, cubic, glass-butted volumes with perfectly flat surfaces: they made a virtue of the right angle. Inside the convention center, however, in the vast hall, they created a huge, shell-like carapace, with fabric stretched between steel ribs, which houses the auditorium and meeting terraces.
The shell acts as the centerpiece of the vast space, and as an exhibit of raw imagination within the rational Cartesian structure that surrounds it. Whether sculpture or architecture or both, the structure exhibits a strong artistic impulse.
So when the commission requires conventional structure, Massimiliano and Doriana Fuksas responds but is always looking for opportunities to channel an artistic drive fused with a strong emotional impulse. Never does the work feel detached and distant. The experience is immersive.
As in the atmospheric St Paolo Church, Italy, Massimiliano and Doriana’s works search for an appropriate emotional content, coloring the object.
They cultivate subjectivity through all the devices in their architectural quiver: form, space, light, color, surface.
It has been said that an architect can be judged by how they handle bookshelves or staircases. With the modernization of China and the proliferation of projects of a huge and almost unprecedented scale often necessitating thousands of workers, it might be said that architects can now be judged by their last airport.
Studio Fuksas recently completed the Bao’an International Airport in Shenzhen, and even at its gargantuan scale it brings the same intensity as Massimiliano’s canvases and the smaller buildings. The roofs and walls, designed as a curvilinear truss with compound curves, flow into and out of each other, forming spaces that are at once gentle and spectacular, with intriguingly patterned ceilings. Without interior columns, the roof alights where necessary for support, showing great independence as it shapes space.
Despite the usually deadening process of building and engineering a project of this size, the airport retains its grace, its energy, and a sense of surprise. It even survives the polish that the computer often brings to a structure.
Marshall McLuhan wrote of cool and warm media, and the computer often produces architecture that is too finished and perfect, and therefore distant, as though it exists in a vacuum. In Massimiliano and Doriana Fuksas’ hands, perhaps because they have worked at the easel, the computer instead emerges as a warm medium, delivering all the spontaneity of a small canvas to a very large structure.
Studio Fuksas is a master of two disciplines and two languages communicating a similar message.
