At the Café della Stampa at Cersaie 2024, Atelier(s) founder Alfonso Femia talks about his design philosophy: times, places, people, cities and water lines

Times, places, people, urban spaces, water lines. These were the topics discussed during the talk ‘The good city, for responsible and generous architecture’ organised by Interni at the Café della Stampa at Cersaie 2024 on 24 September. Alfonso Femia, founder of Atelier(s) Alfonso Femia, talked about his way of understanding and making architecture. Art, architecture, cities, territories, landscapes are a set of elements that generate projects, reflections, actions for real change. Culture becomes an impulse, a drive for transformation, an orientation towards a renewed urban future only if it is effective action.

Full video of the talk at this link

See also the interview with architect Alfonso Femia

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The good city is a city of action, a space for confrontation, an agora tailored to a territory, an honest city.

Times, places and people

In the foreground are the questions that start from making architecture and turn it into a cultural activator. For Alfonso Femia, cultural engagement does not translate into the organisation of events for consumption, an end in itself. Rather, the architect speaks of cultural chapters, situations that set moments of deepening to follow and precede investigations and transversal paths, open, structured on dialogue and experimenting with different points of view. At the centre: times, places and people.

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Architect Alfonso Femia talks with Interni journalist Patrizia Catalano on the topic of the ‘Good City’.

Project as a public act

Every project is a public act, and dialogue is the key to understanding the scenario in which an architect works to discover wonder, beauty in the intimacy of places. Without performance anxiety, because the project, according to Femia, requires slow times to work on the possibilities of change, through a gaze capable of observing, listening, looking at the invisible. In this way architecture becomes that thin thread that binds people and society.

The importance of words

Also important for Femia are words, an act of design between the imaginary and the real. Words as a look, a listening, a question to create a continuous book and to accompany the project by entering into contradiction with the present. The aim is the design of the good city, a city of action, a space of confrontation, an agora on the scale of a territory, an honest city. Developed according to the canons of responsibility, generosity, balance and dialogue. Along a path in five acts involving: mobility (accessibility and connections), public spaces, schools (integration), inhabit (social and urban renewal), water lines.

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The Café della Stampa arena at Cersaie 2024.

Being Mediterranean

And here is water then, for Alfonso Femia, Calabrese by origin and Genoese by action, a vital and fundamental element of architecture. Water as a sentinel of climate change, water as an element not divisive but of connection, dialogue, confrontation, discovery, travel. Being Mediterranean means taking into account the dimension of the journey, real and imaginary, the dimension of time, of the gaze and its reversal. Travel enacts the relationship between time and gaze, between perception and cognition.

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A large audience came to the talk.

The three water lines

In his projects, Alfonso Femia moves along what he calls the three water lines. Coastline, plain and ridge line represent the geomorphological triad of the Mediterranean territories that historically conditions art, architecture, landscape, narrative, society, economy. The keyword for the ridge line is care in respect of origin. The keyword for the plain line is opportunity in the sequence of a route. The keyword for the coastline is infrastructure in the relationship with the boundary between land and sea. Water is a graft, an aerial assimilation between land, nature and artifice. Water favours places, the creation of individual and collective spaces. The projects of the Linear parck in Trieste, new cruise terminal in La Spezia and new maritime station in Porto Corsini in Ravenna, Regium waterfront in Reggio Calabria, waterfront in Algeri bear witness to this.

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For Alfonso Femia, every project is a public act, and dialogue is the key to understanding the scenario in which an architect works to discover wonder, beauty in the intimacy of places.
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