Massimiliano Fuksas, an architect born in Rome and recently returned to the Eternal City, is a legend in Europe, but has yet to become well-known across the Atlantic. The designer has worked for such clients as Ferrari, Alessi, and Armani and he is currently involved in a number of prestigious projects, including the Peace Center in Jaffa, Israel and the African Institute of Science & Technology [AIST] of the Nelson Mandela Institute in Nigeria.
Fuksas is also hard at work on a project in Rome. He bested such international stars as Richard Rogers to win an international competition for a new Congress Center to be constructed in the EUR suburb of the Rome, an area developed by Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini in the early 20th century.
The huge rectangular glass building will cover some 15,000 square meters and will house an auditorium, as well as cafes and meeting rooms. Though the Congress Center’s glass and steel exterior will respond to the style of surrounding Fascist buildings, its centerpiece – a 3500 square meter steel and Teflon cloud suspended from the 100-foot ceiling by cables – will contradict the strict geometry of the exterior form. It’s the kind of move that Fuksas loves. He says:
I never want to be pragmatic over expressionist. I don’t want to be organic over rationalist. I want to be both.
His emphasis on expressionism won him rave reviews when his Milan Trade Fair opened to the public in 2005. In a New Yorker review, critic Paul Goldberger greatly admired the Milan building, noting Fuksas’s ability to make glass and steel undulating like fabric. And his praise of Fuksas seemed aimed to carve a place for the architect in Italy’s long architectural annals:
Fuksas is one of the most deft makers of form. He’s better than anyone else right now at expressing the essence of Italian architecture, which is a combination of new and old presented in an exciting way.
But how did the architect conceive of putting a cloud in a building? He recounts the very moment at which the idea occurred to him:
The idea came to me in a very special moment. I was at the seaside; a group of clouds were being blown quickly across the sky by a strong wind. As I looked to the clouds I remembered a dream I had had, which involved constructing a building that had no crystallized form at all.
Like all architectural projects, Rome’s Congress Center has suffered delays – some of which resulted when ancient ruins were found on the building site. But having opened an office in Rome in order to undertake the Congress Center project (he has others in Frankfurt and Paris), Fuksas is determined to finish the project which is currently scheduled to be completed in 2009.
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