Riccardo Dalisi , who passed away on April 9 at the age of 91, was my Professor of Architectural Design at the Federico II University in Naples .
Designing by imagining
It was the late 90s and I remember the challenge he gave me: 'Can you make two trees fall in love by generating an architecture?'. He was like this: someone who asked you to put together apparently distant things, to imagine unlikely partnerships, to focus on thought and on yourself before starting a project.
I tried it with a pine and a willow.
I wrote a poem in which the pine screamed his love for him to the willow, who accepted it. Then I imagined how the love between the two trees could generate continuous growth : a refuge of one within the other, an infinite embrace that, stabilizing itself, generated a structure .
A church came out.
By imagining two trees in love, I had created an architecture sensitive to beauty, a building that reflected the nature of man and of his feelings.
It looked like magic, but it was the first great teaching of that unique professor.