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A packed house at the National Art Gallery were pleased to greet and listen to Massimiliano Fuksas [fook suss] on February 27, 2006. He came from Rome for his first speaking engagement to Canada to the Forum Series. One of his architectural pieces is commemorated on a 0.45 Euro stamp, rare for a living architect. He says because he is old now, over 60, now he is honored with medals and certificates and honors. He says he knows this is just how things is. It is his age, not the quality of his work compared to any time. When he is dead, there will be exhibitions, but not until then. Fuksas has asked himself for 60 years why he does as he does in architecture. He explains his work as doing something like light does to the sculpture which is a city block. Light destroys flattens form and makes is more spiritual, a chaos sublime. To demonstrate how he designs he asked for a sheet of paper from someone in the audience, walked over to the wall sconces and bent the page in various ways to show how the light changes the object. He is interested in not adding but taking away, simplifying, playing with planes. He likes to work with transparency and solidity. In one piece, he used hundreds of workers to set a sort of harlequin pattern of metal framework for glass, drooped over many planes. When LPs first became less popular, did you participate in putting them in the oven to soften and reshape into remolded ornaments and vases? The way this roof looks melted and moulded have something of that simplicity of organic shape. What he does has brought him to an established success through his love of play. He has been constructing works throughout Europe in Italy France, Spain, Israel for decades. That isn't to say that he has rested on his laurels. He is still very much interested in the process and stylistically shifting. In the 1990s he was absorbed in combining opposites, dark with light, square with round, contrasting materials, solidity of concrete and glass cutaways. In the 2000s he finds himself looking at free, happy "organic" shapes. Massimiliano Fuksas' work in the last few years look as though it were inspired by eggs, clouds, or balloons extruded out of either side of a fist. He draws on inspiration of funnel clouds for tornados for shapes. What is architecture? he asked rhetorically and answered. The dialectic concept that has been for more than 200 years is ending. Before we could build in schools of styles. We could build for a century. Now we build in a month or a year. We can build architecture that is for now and here but not to make one thing for a century. We live in a compressed time-space culture. What is architecture? It is shape. It is form. It is also democracy and symbol. When you destroy a building, you destroy a form, a shape, but not architeture. When you destroy a symbol of a concept, such as the Golden Dome that was bombed, you hurt more than building, you hurt architecture and democracy. Architecture, he explained is not shape, and it is not form. It is something more similar to the way that erotic is not just shape and not just form. | ||||||||
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