All language subtitles for Where Architects Live (2014)_en

Downloaded from
YTS.MX

Official YIFY movies site:
YTS.MX

I'm living in the airplane.

- In the airplane? - Yes.

I take an airplane an average of about fifteen times a month.

The site was kind of small forest,

and I decide not to cut any tree to put this building,

so I look for some special...

structure grid system.

Normally, structure grid

is square or rectangular,

but I found out the triangular grid,

which gives me more freedom to decide

which...

space I can leave to the trees and also to the roots under the ground.

Because if we have a square grid, the corner...

There is a four beams meeting,

and we can eliminate only one,

we need other three beams supporting the one column

to stay up right.

But if we make this triangular grid,

there are six beams meeting in one point,

so up to three beams I can eliminate,

if we have a tree or a root is there.

This is the smaller apartment I can afford.

But still it has the better view of the trees outside.

This is my lifestyle,

I don't want to be surrounded by things.

I always want to design something particular for a particular site,

so this solution cannot be applied for anywhere else.

I'm not interested in owning the things,

the house is one of the things.

I'm not interested in owning things.

The all of them are prototypes,

so when I design prototypes I try to use them by myself.

Terragni is one of my favorite architects.

Also this Cantilever chair was really innovative,

so that's why a bought it.

Actually I was very interested in his buildings when I was younger,

because he is using geometry

very cleverly and also clearly.

My favorite project was the Danteum,

which was not built.

I analyzed this building, and so I was very interested

to study how he controlled the geometry.

I respect the most Castiglioni,

he's my favorite designer.

So there are great designers that made great furniture.

Light and shadow are the most important of any architecture for me.

And also the cross ventilation is very important

for residential projects.

I'm not interested in eco-things,

it is a fashion, it's a commercial thing,

nobody really understand what it's eco,

and just people use this without really thinking the meaning.

I'm more interested in the materials,

structure and also the particular context,

to take advantage of.

Anything can be a part of architecture,

and the paper is one of them.

This is your prejudice about paper,

you think paper it's something unusual but it's not, anything can be part of a building.

I just want to choose the appropriate materials for the appropriate use and function.

For the temporary structure, but it can be permanent,

and also for some affordable housing,

temporary housing after a disaster,

but also this can be permanent, the building material also.

I was quite disappointed about the profession of architects,

because I saw that today we can work more for the general public or the society,

but I knew it, we are mostly working for privileged people,

because they have money and power, which is invisible,

that's why they hire architects,

to visualize their power and money with monumental architecture.

And also I still want to design these monuments,

but I was also tired of just working for privileged people.

That's why I started doing the pro bono project

and dedicating my own energy doing this Disaster Relief project,

in order to make my mental balance.

I wanted to be a carpenter, when I was very small,

I was very interested in making things out of wood, I love wood.

Then I was able

to take some class in the school,

teaching how to design a building very simple, very basic studies,

and I was very good to this,

so that's why I decided to be an architect.

I don't get inspiration, but I respect so much like Issey Miyake,

he's also designing from the system.

Not just the decoration,

but he created a new concept as a fashion designer,

so I respect him so much.

And also do you still remember Kuramata?

Shiro Kuramata, I respect him so much also,

he also...

created a new meaning of the materials also,

using some existent material differently.

I'd like to keep designing houses

until the end of my career.

Many architects after they became very famous and they get big projects,

they stop doing housing or also many of the people

also like to do bigger projects.

But the architects that I really respect, Le Corbusier, Mies Van Der Rohe, Alvar Aalto,

they kept designing the houses until they die,

that's my hope.

Because it's important for me to keep training myself.

Designing houses is the most typical project as architect,

as a program of a building.

That's what I've seen in those kinds of wonderful great architects

that kept design houses.

Thank you so much.

Milan is a city with a Center, Piazza del Duomo, and a ring of canals, the Navigli,

and between them the historic city.

Then there's the city that grew up in the last century,

but it too has its own distinctive character,

with the rays that head outwards and the old gates.

The city is always very present in my mind, it affects how I feel when in Milan.

Milan is a city that offers you opportunities:

you live in a historic city,

with plentiful evidence of its embedded past and values.

It may not have the dazzling beauty of - say - Rome, Florence or Venice,

but it has a particular beauty of its own, this ‘Milanese-Ness'.

I have always lived in Milan,

and when I think about this I realize that,

even if I've changed house several times,

I have remained a city-dweller, mentally:

living in Milan you end up with an urban culture.

I have never thought of being able

to design and build myself a house here, it's just not an option:

a city has a complex fabric, it's a finished organism.

This was a house designed by Piero Portaluppi,

who did not build it from scratch, but restored a 19th century building

and refurbished it...

to suit a client.

When I found it, the house was looking rather old, dilapidated and sad,

but I was able to renovate it entirely,

hanging on to some interesting elements from the '30s,

but changing its personality.

If I had to sum up my home in a couple of words,

I'd say it's a huge, soaring bookcase in which I walk around, seeing and touching my books.

Sometimes I tidy them, other times I leave total confusion

and I struggle to find them again...

But this is the heart of my home,

there's even a narrow table where I can stop, on my way up or down, and read something, etc.

From the bookcase I can look upstairs and downstairs,

it's a kind of telescope

that brings the various parts of the house together.

A lovely thing about going up and down along the...

bookcases/library/stairs, is the areas where they end.

As I reach the last of the pear-wood stairs

awaiting me is a spectacle that, every time, enriches my spirit and comforts me:

it's a cycle of secco wall paintings

done by the English artist David Tremlett.

When I realized he was working with paper and cartoons

in preparation for secco wall paintings,

I said that maybe the only way to have something authentic from him

is to offer him a few walls on which to create a piece of art.

After all,

it's great to have a work of art in your house,

you end up living inside it,

but it remains something that is never yours,

because it belongs to the house.

Stairs are a system

that transforms your state, they take you from one point to another,

but it's not like taking an elevator, which is a stupid thing.

Because you enter a box and come out of it somewhere else.

With stairs, you really experience the change.

And if you manage to turn a staircase into something rich and meaningful,

then stairs can be more than a means of moving from one floor to another,

they can be a hub that connects places.

I always think of this staircase when I come in and out of my office,

as I go up and down it makes a noise because it's built of industrial materials:

perforated sheet metal, all galvanized.

So with each step I take you hear "bang, bang, bang...",

a noise that gives me a real physical satisfaction, I'm creating something,

it's hardly concert music but a sound announcing

that I'm coming in or going out, walking up or down, etc.

And this has a lot in common

with the situation I experience nowadays in my home.

So if I'm asked how and where architects live, my answer is:

I don't just live in my house but in my office too.

Sometimes I think:

here I am living in this house packed with opportunities, things, books, records...

But occasionally I can't help thinking: what if I instead had a simple white cube,

made not of precious white marble but of nothing,

mere plaster, a pale concrete floor.

It would become possible to reconsider everything all once again, and to experiment.

Maybe this is the architect's privilege, as well as his folly,

if we want to start over again and try living with the minimum of signs, the minimum of steps.

Also with the minimum of emotions, essentially,

so as to experience the emotion of reading, listening, living,

much more than simply obtaining visual pleasure from what you see all around.

Mondrian, for example, he lived in a humble, simple, white house.

There he developed the language of his paintings,

which then became those wonderful things we are now familiar with,

he painted red stripes on the walls,

added a small table and colored it yellow,

then lived as part of his picture, a sculpture

he was creating little by little.

The Italian verb "abitare", to live, and the noun "abito", garment, share the same root:

I inhabit but this is a garment, I wear a garment

and at this moment I "wear" this sofa.

It would be interesting to research the semantic origins

that these two words have in common, "abitare", to live, and "abito", that is garment.

Both words refer to the individual,

who is the unit of measurement of everything we're discussing.

Why a house? Good question.

Maybe the first question is: why an office?

Because when you win a project in another city

you don't necessarily have to have an office.

Neues Museum sucks into Berlin in a deep way, I suppose.

Because Neues Museum wasn't just a matter of saying: "Let's have an office in Berlin!".

The office was because of the project, no other reason.

But the experience of Neues Museum became an experience difficult to throw away

for the people that worked on that project, the team,

the major players in my office, who spent 10 years

working with one of the most complicated,

Intellectually, technically,

politically,

one of the most complicated projects you can imagine.

It was also very difficult for me

not to stay involved in Berlin in a profound way.

You know, these things are connected.

I could live in a hotel from a suitcase

and I have 10 years been in a small apartment,

but there was an opportunity for us to consolidate our little campus.

When we wanted to be speculators on this piece of land, we realized

that it was better that we did it for ourselves.

So we built ourselves a café, you know, we built a...

We did at least all the things we needed.

Then I suppose... well it would be nice if I have a place as well in this context.

It grew out of this.

Berlin is a broken city, and shows its fractures and for...

Because of its particular history, it's never been able to close those gaps.

The first thing you do with a gap

is trying to understand what was there originally.

So, what was here originally,

it's typical of Berlin Mitte and a lot of parts of Berlin,

was a courtyard house construction.

So you have a front house, you go through an arch,

you have a courtyard, you go through another arch, you have another courtyard,

you go through an arch and you have another courtyard.

We had a prototype function on the site,

because one of the small buildings that was a ruin

we used as a canteen for our own staff,

but it actually became very popular in the area even,

it became quite well known as a lunch-time café,

so we thought when we rebuild we should include this as a program,

what we sort of affectionately called "the ambassador's residence",

which is my house.

I wouldn't call it a manifesto, but there was certainly a pressure

to try and do something which, in a fairly intense way,

represented what we sort of believe in.

We are committed to the idea that architecture is something that needs to be made,

and its making becomes part of its character,

and this is a resistant position against the tendency of contemporary construction,

which is trying to go the opposite way,

which is to assemble as quickly as possible, and to deskill,

and to take away all evidence of process.

We are interested in how you make a building,

not just how you detail it.

People say: "You're interested in... your buildings are well detailed".

I'm interested in... trying to make...

the construction of the building inform the quality of the building.

So in this we investigated,

the idea of an insulated concrete,

where you could essentially make a building in one go.

There is no second fix.

So when the concrete is finished, all you have to do is put the windows in

and there is no other layer, there isn't even insulation.

The insulation is within the thickness of the wall.

So conceptually it was quite interesting.

It was like making a ruin in a way.

I suppose it's a strange paradox here to talk about a private life,

when your house is...

fundamentally linked to your office,

there isn't a huge amount of privacy involved, I suppose.

But there is an element of sanctuary.

And I think, you know, I don't see the issue

of a house much different from anything else.

You want to make places where you want to be, you know,

that's the power of architecture.

I think, as creatures, we both want to be...

protected and exposed,

but at the times that suit us, I mean,

we don't want to be exposed at the moment we want to be protected

and we don't want to be protected...

So we are, as individuals,

always rehearsing this balance

between retreat and commitment.

So, from your position of protection,

you see the world

and that's what a good building does.

Clearly your house is a private place but, at the same time,

I think, as communal animals,

the house is not innocent in terms of... it's not just going and sleeping and having a fridge,

All of us, I think, see our house as a frontier

between a private comfort and the first step of where we meet people.

In my case, that threshold is the opposite way,

we're sitting in my living room and you're intruders into my life,

but clearly I have set my life happiness in a certain way that anticipates

and accommodates a sort of higher tolerance or threshold

to intrusion than other people might feel comfortable with.

What's interesting about having a second house

is that you don't have to have all the stuff you have in your first house, you know.

In your first house you go to the kitchen and you're looking for a knife,

and there are all sorts of other: "What the hell is that?"

You've accumulated over 30 years, all sorts of rubbish.

Here, in a second house, you are much more selective,

you write a new history in a way, you don't...

You cherry-pick all the things, so it's quite interesting:

we brought some things from our London house, a sort of stealing,

like a sort of pilfering of bits that you say, you...

And then you're looking on and say:

"Shit we're taking some nice things away from there and putting them here".

We built our first project in Paris,

designed in '85 - '86, it's the famous folding building,

the first example of folding.

It's an important building located behind the Bastille.

Faubourg Saint-Antoine is another site in which we worked with an artist,

Enzo Cucchi,

who did a...

Strangely enough, he did a good job.

Yes, in an interior, inside a gym.

Beneath the houses, there is also a sports Center,

in a basement, and on top there's a tennis Center.

When Mitterand was elected,

he launched a broad program of cultural change.

In France at that time there were all the major presidential competitions,

open to those invited, but also to foreigners.

Then there was the Odéon, Strehler was invited to the Odéon, great poets,

great intellectuals from all over the world, architects, flocked to Paris.

One of the options that France launched

was a sort of Biennale, a biennale for young architects.

One of these "new guys",

they decided that it was Fuksas,

who was doing odd things, but things that shared

this "esprit de la modernité",

a new contemporary spirit.

The commission included Baudrillard, François Barré, there was Virilio,

it was a very fresh new environment.

And we were summoned mainly for one work, no, maybe two,

and you can see a sample there,

that was done with Sebastián Matta,

which is in Tarquinia,

and the other was the Paliano gymnasium,

the building that made me quite well known,

which was the first sloping building,

almost synonymous with a collapse.

We lived at Île Saint-Louis, the first house we ever had in Paris.

Contrary to what we might have imagined,

for us Île Saint-Louis was really a tourist spot,

but in fact it was one of the most entertaining French districts.

And then we moved again to rue du Temple,

a large and very impressive studio over three floors

and in the meantime, having moved.

One of our daughters, the youngest, was born in Paris.

It's a place we like coming back to.

Sometimes I like to return here, and other times to Rome,

then it depends where the people you love are, the people you are fond of.

The best situation is staying in Rome for a while,

and then in Paris, and from there moving around,

to have an idea of what's going on in the world,

because there's nothing worse than being stuck somewhere.

Here it's like being in the country, because the windows look out over a wonderful carpet

that changes with the seasons, so now it's yellow, red, autumn.

Then it turns green, lovely, then it changes,

you come home and you have a different carpet, according to the season,

and you can hear the fountains splashing, you can hear the birds,

while there's no traffic noise at all.

But it's not just the architect, the client,

it's when your husband is the client, then you'll see...!

We have done some work on the house, but not a lot,

we've opened up a bit, taken out a bath tub that looked...

All made of alabaster, with lights inside, on a pedestal.

- Because this house, belonged to an architect. - Yes.

- All three floors. - Yes, an architect owned it all.

And he was a rather particular architect called Pouillon,

who was very famous in France in the '60s and '70s.

He was here and he rightly had

his own sexual and erotic passions and sentimental compulsions,

that had something of an erotic pathway.

We left the sequence, of course, we removed the baignoire,

and turned it into a "monopersonal" bath.

There are also Prouvé furniture, ours are originals.

The first real awareness, not exactly mass recognition,

but a bit more important, for Prouvé, came with our Biennale in the year 2000.

The emergency houses.

Yes, we had exhibited five emergency houses at the Arsenale.

And the problem was finding a system for assembling them,

because they had never been assembled before and nobody knew how to do that.

There are several gifts, yes, because Massimiliano doesn't want anything,

giving him a present isn't easy.

- I love you and that's enough. - Yes, but I'm one.

So the only thing I can give him, at least I hope so,

the only thing he won't object to is a work of art.

That's a model for the Philips Pavilion at the Triennale?

What's it for? I really can't remember any more.

No, it's from 1961 for Turin...

- For the Triennale? - For Turin, the pavilion of light.

There's Fontana, Boetti,

all the things we love,

there's Noguchi, always in all our homes, well it's easier.

There's a little desk

that we are really very fond of,

because it was Lavinia's when she was small, not hers,

it's a little "pupitre" with a little Jean Prouvé chair, again.

- They are the guardians of the home. - Yes there are guardians.

That was their purpose, sentinels in front of African houses.

- And we've got more of them. - They come from Mali.

- In Pantelleria too, in Siena at the doors. - They are Dogon art.

We've got quite a lot of African art.

And then there are other figures too.

You don't notice them in here but there are lots of things.

It has to be said that I haven't got a locked drawer,

and there is no desk, not even in my Rome studio.

I haven't got my own studio,

or a room just for me, the place where I am.

Everyone asks: "But where does Fuksas work?"

Well, I wander round the office, I have a pen, I put it in my pocket and off I go.

I don't only believe in inspiration, inspiration is one part,

but close to inspiration there is the existence of a human being,

we build for others, we should understand how others live,

what their strengths and weaknesses are.

More than projects, it's people's lives that matter,

the human condition that surrounds architecture is the most important, the most amazing thing.

I liked my house when I was in Baghdad.

I think that was a very nice house and I enjoyed being there

and now it's very important for me because it's a very unusual place

and it was very nice, but when I moved away, I was like a gipsy, you know,

I moved to Beirut, here and there, London, moved around a lot,

so I have never really settled down in one place that was a home for me.

I used to come here as a child and I always wanted to live in London because,

again the ‘60s was such a great period, you know...

King's Road, there were all these... Marie Quant,

great shops,

the Beatles, you know, cinema, bla bla...

So I always wanted to come and live here,

then I went to school here and then I went back to Beirut, which really I'm glad I did,

because living in Beirut was a great experience for me.

It was the first time that we lived in an Arab country,

where you come across many other Arabs from every other country

because they all went to that university.

I wanted to become an architect,

so I moved back to London and I went to the Architectural Association

and I stayed here because I always...

firstly, because I liked it, second because of my association with the AA,

because that was a very important part of my life:

being there, teaching there, I was so connected with the AA till the late ‘80s.

I like London, I mean, I think London has become

the most metropolitan and cos-modern city of anywhere I know,

even more than New York,

because it was generous enough to allow everybody to come and live here.

Now the conservatives want to radically change that

but that made London great.

If you walk on the streets, you see every nationality in the world and I think that...

And all these people who moved here brought in something with them.

The reason I think that living is very important is because,

apart from it being very important as a shelter,

you should have the minimal existence, you should have shelter

and it should also make people feel better, in the idea of well being.

I personally think and right now,

unlike the early part of the 20th century,

when the most important projects started off as houses,

think of Le Corbusier, Mies and all these people, they did houses, private houses,

as kind of a genesis of their ideas.

I personally think now it's quite different,

I don't think the most critical thing is to do a house.

I still think it's a very important topic,

I think it's a very important topic to talk about mass housing,

about social housing,

even about private villas,

but I don't think it's not ideological anymore.

I had a very nice apartment before, more traditional, like a Georgian house,

and I wanted to move closer to the office,

so I found this kind of neutral room,

but of course all the furniture is mine.

I would like to design my own house,

but I need an office to do it

and my office will never do my house,

because they are too busy.

We bought last year the Design Museum in London.

There was a design museum which still operates as a design museum,

so we bought it,

at the office, I bought it,

and if I decide to move my flat there,

on top of it, maybe I can do something.

It's very important to think of how people live,

you know, and...

I don't think it's a private house, I think one has to think about housing

in the city or anywhere, you know, because I think that they...

they do form the structure of the city.

I don't believe in the zoning law, zoning, in the sense that the Center is all...

commercial or retail and fun

and you put everybody out.

I don't believe in this segregation of all the programs.

So I think housing is a very important component of the city,

I think without that you don't have a city.

And you have to always update your thinking about what a house should be,

how people should live, what kind of life they should have.

I mean there was a reason why in the early 20th century,

in the early part of the 20th century, they thought they should have glass and light,

not because they liked glass,

but because they wanted to bring in light into the house and into the working place,

because it was better for people, especially in Europe,

where everything was dark, if you think of London.

I think that lifestyle has changed, this whole idea about, you know,

kitchen could be in the living room,

lofts allowed you to make bedroom, no division between bedroom and living,

I think that... and also I think now you can really have different kind of furniture

and, you know, much lighter,

I think that... more spacious maybe, more spatiality.

Well, it could mean that you have different perspectives,

you are not fixed into one view point, the interior also,

some of them they have multiple balconies and you have different projections out,

so you can look that way, you can look that way.

I think, I hope,

it gives you more fluidity and freedom in the space,

you know, things flow to the outside and inside,

and I think it's important to have kind of created this kind of spaces,

if you are confined for space,

that gives you this vistas to the outside

and you feel you can have kind of a luxury, even if the flat is not very big.

Well, I think space is the most important,

how to create space, is very difficult to... quantify.

When I was a student, people used to talk about space all the time,

but I have never understood what they were talking about,

so to create a space is the most complex

and that's why I think complexity is very important in architecture,

because it creates multiplicity of spaces, you know, amazing...

It was like the Baroque, you know,

multiplicity of spaces and rooms.

I like obviously very big pieces,

because I want them to become another architecture inside the architecture.

So it's no longer just, you know, a domestic piece,

they operate as a way of dividing space

or making kind of objects within the city, but in the room.

In the city you have to have harmony between the objects, between the pieces and how...

and you need infrastructure to connect them together.

You need to make the street pattern or the roads or whatever, and I think,

it depends... if a building is an object it's equally complex,

because if you want to integrate complexity,

you can actually almost duplicate the life in the city within the object,

but if it's an object as a piece of furniture, you know,

of course is more... is not necessarily easier but I think it's different.

I think with these private houses, for architects,

you have to do them as a first house,

like a first statement of your ideas,

or you have to do them when you are retiring.

I'm not ready to retire yet.

Here we are in our office, Studio MK27,

in Sao Paulo,

the chaotic Latin American city

where we live:

it's extremely...

ugly,

violent and polluted,

but we deeply love it.

For me Sao Paulo has a really special appeal,

it's a city...

for which I feel a kind of worship, I really like its contrasts.

You walk down the street and there appears to be nothing to see.

There's a lot of traffic, an absolutely infernal traffic.

This great excitement,

this urge to produce,

to live, to create a new world it's a tangible feeling.

My apartment is in the building

that was my first design project,

I don't even know how I came to be entrusted with the job, I had just graduated,

and it was practically my last such project since I subsequently did little in this sector.

I have lived in that apartment

since the early '80s.

I think this is a very unattractive part of the town,

but there's a school,

a bank,

a bar open 24/7,

further over, where you see the hotel tower,

there's a shopping mall,

with a 5-screen multiplex,

a shopping street with pharmacies,

very centrally located in San Paolo.

The apartment is nothing special from the architectural perspective,

as I don't like working for myself,

when I get back from the office I don't feel like it...

My bathroom's bulb it's burned since two weeks!

Glass is a key element of my projects, especially for those made in Brazil,

where the climate is fairly agreeable, not like here today!

In this houses people can open all their living room's large sliding windows,

turning their dining area into a terrace with windows on both sides,

to let in more light and air,

so the lovely gardens are brought right into the home.

Practically all of that is in relationship with the interiors,

it's only recently that we started designing interiors,

because we regard them as a continuum of the architecture.

Everything involves architecture:

the garden, the exterior stone wall,

that is part of the project,

the sofa.

One single line of thought.

Lighting is deeply connected

to my career as a filmmaker.

I did a lot for movies during my early working years,

when I still wasn't sure whether I'd become an architect or a film director.

I studied filmmaking and architecture at the same time

and I also produced some films in that period

and I think that light is one of the things

that I learned from the world of cinema.

I believe, for example, that a script has a lot in common with a design project,

I mean, a film script:

trying to create a story,

a goal, a feeling,

a space untouched by monotony,

exiting a corridor to enter another space,

a meeting room, with another story to tell.

Something else that influenced me a lot

was looking through a camera.

I always have the feeling of looking into a viewfinder

seeing the world as if on the big screen.

Something else of importance that I learned in the movie world was to work as a team.

In architecture there's always been a Chief Architect

with all the others working under him

on a new project, a new job.

But coming from the movie world

in my firm I introduced my teamwork philosophy,

a really cooperative way to work.

I'm putting together a collection with my son,

who's also the curator of my collection,

a collection of sketches.

This is a print by Le Corbusier,

of the Chandigarh project, this is by Niemeyer,

this one by Kengo Kuma, a friend, that recently left us a drawing.

I've brought an assortment of architects' drawings to the office.

Here I have my sketches collection,

the same in the office, but not only architects'.

I love this one, it's the smallest Picasso in the history...

This is a drawing from Woody Allen to Mia Farrow.

- No! - Drawings of love! - I love you Mia...

I like collecting,

because it's collecting life itself.

Each thing recalls a moment, so I can remember.

For instance, the Peck pasta you gave me:

it ended up on the bookshelves, not in the kitchen.

I believe that in my work, as I already said,

I'm practically a prostitute,

I get paid for giving others pleasure,

but don't have time to offer myself pleasure.

This strikes me as a good term of comparison!

Saying that always make me smile.

My clients want to enhance their quality of life,

they want to experience new emotions,

the pleasure of owning a work of architecture

with a meaning,

and basically this is what I see as architecture's mission:

to make the world a slightly better place.

It was my kind of fate or destiny to live in different cities,

because of necessity and sometimes because of choice.

But I was born in Poland, so I grew up in a city called Łódź,

industrial, grey city, under communism,

living in a small hovel, you know,

where the bathtub was in the kitchen,

because that was where the water connection was.

Today you would say looking back it was a slum,

but to us, it was very nice because that's all we had

and then from Poland,

when we were able to move to Israel, we moved to Tel Aviv.

And that was blue skies, freedom,

a completely fantastic sense of the Mediterranean

and we lived, as it happened, because Tel Aviv was a Bauhaus city,

in a Bauhaus apartment building, built by a German Jewish architect

with the terrace, with the beauty of Tel Aviv.

You know, then, of course, we moved to New York,

and not Manhattan, but in Bronx.

And in the Bronx, we were immigrants, once again,

my parents were Holocaust survivors,

and my father had this only surviving sister from a family of...

Many, no one remains, so he was determinate to come to America

and then in the Bronx, we moved to...

We lived in a housing project, the first social housing project built in the United States,

by the Unions representing garment workers

and my mother was a garment worker, working in this sweatshop of New York.

So we lived a beautiful project,

in a very diversified Jewish, Italian, Irish,

African-American, mix of people,

in an apartment that was a social space,

no air conditioning, of course, the fire escapes were the social spaces,

to spend many hot evenings discussing politics

and kind of representative of the life in New York of that time.

When I was lucky to become the head of a school of architecture I moved to Detroit,

this was Bloomfield Hills, one of the richest areas of America,

where I lived in a campus called Cranbrook, I was the head of the architecture faculty,

I was an artist-in-residence, in a project built by Saarinen,

Elial Saarinen, the father of Eero Saarinen, the great Finnish architect

and, as it happened, as the head of architecture,

I was living in the same villa that Charles Eames lived in:

a fantastic villa with an incredible garden,

with that kind of Finnish-American sense of beauty,

functionality and organized as a plan, really,

of an entire little enclave of good luck in America.

Then, after that, you know, we moved to Milan,

and we lived with our kids, we came to Milan,

my good friend, Aldo Rossi was a very close friend,

and we moved for no reason, we had no jobs,

we just wanted to live in Milan,

because to us it represented really a fantastic dream of being in Italy,

but being particularly in this special atmosphere of art,

artists, of great history,

and we lived in a fantastic street, via Benedetto Marcello,

high up where I also established a private...

I called that "Architecture Inter-mundium", a small school,

I called it a kind of medieval way of doing architecture,

in the home with students from around the world who came to study with me.

After that we moved to Berlin when I won the competition for the Jewish Museum.

We moved to the Center of Berlin before the fall of the Wall,

1989, it was a time of change, the Wall fell

and we were in the city that transformed itself, the world was being transformed.

During my time, when I was designing a project that wasn't easy to realize,

it took twelve years to realize it,

and you know, I was there on September 11, 2001,

because that was the day the Jewish Museum opened to the public,

and that was the day I went to my studio and said:

"This is the first day I don't have to think about history

because people can come to the museum and have their own experience"

and of course by about 2:40, 2:38 in the afternoon

the Jewish museum closed its doors.

That's why I decided I had to go back to New York,

and how lucky was I to win the competition to be the master planner of Ground Zero.

And I moved to Manhattan, right next to Ground Zero, in TriBeCa,

where I live in, you know, in the old bank building,

TriBeCa is an old neighborhood, but I found the one building that is triangular,

with a sharp point, and we reconstructed it,

I had an architect to do the work, because I didn't have even the time,

new windows, it has really, you know, a lot of light

and a spectacular place,

reaffirming the resurgence of New York.

I see the Freedom Tower, I see the buildings of my site plan

both from my home, and from my bedroom and from my living room,

but also see them from our studio and our office,

just south of Ground Zero.

When you live in the Bronx, people think: "Bronx is the Center of the world",

when you live in Tel Aviv, people say: "Tel Aviv is the Center of the world",

when you live in Milan, people say: "This is the Center of the world",

when you live anywhere in the world...

People, wherever they live, it is the Center of the world.

And that's true, because the world

is not a disconnected group of fragments,

it is a concentric series of circles around the soul,

the spirit of where you are.

I love books in general, and I've always loved books.

I love old books, I love art books,

I love books that were given to me,

I even love books that I will never read, but I like to have them.

I think books are a part of a home,

I think it was Cicero who said:

"A home without books is like a body without a soul".

Perhaps you were in my apartment in New York, but there is a table there,

which I wanted to get rid of already many, many years, it's the first that I ever designed.

When I came to Milan, we didn't have anything,

we were sitting on the floor, we had no beds, we had nothing.

So there was a carpenter down below, I saw a carpenter working,

I said: "The first thing we need is a table".

And this table has travelled with us,

it's been in Berlin, it's been in New York, it's been in Milan, it's been everywhere,

it's maybe not particularly beautiful aesthetically,

but it became so much part of life,

and actually many people think it's one of the best design objects

because is very, very practical.

I love red, you know, I love the color,

and I like white, I like black, I like grey,

but I like red as a color.

Why? I don't know, it's just...

it's just the color of awakening.

And I think a house has to be comfortable,

but it also has to awaken you and others

to the fact that the world is always changing,

that even your notion of the home is not a permanent notion,

because you might be living elsewhere soon,

for various reasons, you might have to move out, you might have to pack your suitcase,

something else might be happening,

so the red is a kind of a permanent emblem of the dynamism of change.

There is really no difference, in some way,

between designing a private villa for my client in Connecticut,

or the fantastic project of City Life in Milan,

because you think about the life, the everyday life,

and everyday life is a spectrum.

It's like the rainbow of all the colors that are in the skyline.

A home not being just a house, being a home,

having intimacy, having a certain warmth to it,

being something that is emotional,

not only an abstract division of space and light,

and I think probably light, scale,

coziness, I would call it coziness,

without sentimentality, that you can...

be enclosed in intimacy.

To me a good apartment, a good house,

is something that inspires, doesn't only meet the functional requirements:

that is comfortable, and everything works well,

so you can forget about all those things;

but it has to make you more creative,

you have to be able to look at a corner, and it has to make you more intelligent,

has to give you another idea of the world.

And I think those are the houses that I've been inspired by,

and I always say that's what really house is,

it's not just about the measurable space,

it's about the ineffable atmosphere,

it's a certain atmosphere you can't quite touch it,

but you know that's there because of architecture.

Why Studio Mumbai?

For me, Studio Mumbai was a generic name, it found a location.

The idea is that of a studio, whether we grow rice,

build architecture, tend cattle...

I'm just saying that there is no line,

it's a working space, it's a place of work

which is located in Mumbai, whatever the work might be.

That was the idea behind the word Studio Mumbai.

People can come in,

people can participate and leave,

freely.

With the idea that the ethics is what remains intact,

the ethics as a space for expression.

Let's take, for example, this particular stone mason,

he was sharing with me his life experiences,

his family, the terrains he had traversed,

the food he had eaten, the people he had met,

there were so many stories within that, but he used stone.

Stone was the link, the material that he worked with,

was the instrument, if you want to call it.

I guess it's also very Italian, it's like a family.

When you cook and your grandmother,

there's a whole community that comes together.

My interest lies in: can we find a bridge

to draw the informal resource with the formal resource

and then make a product,

or make a table, a chair, or whatever that might be, a box, anything,

that in some way can proliferate.

We were talking about Castiglioni.

For me the interest in Castiglioni was that,

at some point, the pieces that he made

eventually became anonymous, you lost the origin of the maker.

This house, actually, was inhabited by all kinds of animals,

because no one was here.

So there was a bobcat, like a wild cat,

and as we spent the time they, one by one,

started to move out of the house.

When we first moved here 17 years ago,

it was very different then,

I would not say it was a jungle, but it was quite rural

and the first night I remember we slept in our room,

we heard this noise on the roof, like tam tam...

and we were concerned that there were monkeys,

there was no telephone, it was pitch dark,

it was a very different time,

but in that process of evolution,

we also in some way overcame our ignorance

of participation in a landscape like this.

This all property is actually rented, so we moved here around 17 years ago.

The house, I have learnt...

about living in a house, by living in this house.

I think if we consider our time as being temporary,

that we are temporal beings,

our ability to participate,

not on ownership or rent, but the ability to participate with care,

independent of ownership or rental is I think what is fundamental.

Where we are, this was a small extension.

It was more of finding a way

to make a space that was in relationship with the tree,

and how this space enabled or accommodated the tree

or the reverse, the tree accommodated the space.

This is a Ficus Benjamin tree, it is a Banyan tree,

so it drops its roots, that eventually become branches,

in some way, we have to drive the tree in relationship to the space.

There is a maintenance or...

an attention that is required on both sides.

But it's not Bijoy's house, this house.

I think it's a collection of many people who participate, like yourselves,

you know, I am just one of the many, not the only.

I'm very interested in this idea of accommodation.

Accommodate is to give shelter,

it's the primary premise.

So this idea that you talked about protection or shelter...

I believe that it's inherent in us.

It's again...

We all struggle with this idea of being alone.

I think water, for me, is the most fundamental premise

in the creation of anything or in the creation of life.

In a sense, it's the foundation.

You know, I imagine myself visiting this place, and actually just, you know...

going through the pool and, in some way, to experience the house.

Water is pretty much the basis or the origin of every project that has been made,

because it's the origin of space in some way.

Let's take Tara House.

The house that we saw, with the well and we found...

There was a cut in the ground when we went to the site.

It was sweet water.

It was a cut that had been made some time ago,

so it had evolved through time,

and there was still sweet water at the base.

We made that the basis, the Center of the project.

It's an imaginary Center.

One thing also is the idea of nourishment

because it's so close to you, it's like a belly-button of the house.

So if I take Palmyra House, the house will cease to exist,

but the plantation and the water channels will continue to be there,

even if man, for example, doesn't participate,

because with the rains, the monsoons, it would still move the water,

the water would somehow still find the way to move back and forth.

These are just extensions of the human body, at the end of the day.

If we build with care,

the aesthetics will automatically have its own resonance.

You know what I mean?

It's the lack of care that is what we experience, that's why we sense it,

if there was something that I would write, it would be just "take care".