Four studios around the world, from Rome to Paris, from China to Saudi Arabia, over six hundred projects completed, from houses to towers, from skyscrapers to shopping malls, cultural and religious spaces, museums, airports, schools and now also the participation in The Line, the sci-fi vertical city that is being built in the desert between the mountains and the Red Sea. Eighty years old on January 9, Massimiliano Fuksas is a volcano in full swing, satisfied with his life, but with his eyes firmly planted on a future with great horizons. "I am a nomad, my country is the world. What am I missing? Maybe just designing a whole city, but I'm working on it." The telephone appointment is set for the morning, the architect answers ANSA from his Roman studio shared like everything with his wife Doriana, surrounded by colleagues and collaborators, many young voices. They call him and he stops to check, corrects, spurs, gives advice: "With your drawing you have to make them dream!"
Insert caption
Then he stops and tells his story: from Italian projects, "even the smallest ones such as the research center for Ferrari or the architecture of Bassano del Grappa for the Nardini distilleries," to the first shopping center built in Salzburg in the nineties, a riot of transparencies and light that revolutionized the genre a bit, he says, "because I hated shopping malls at the time." From the Fiera di Milano to the Nuvola in Rome, from the Shenzen airport in China to the cultural center of Rhike Park in Tbilisi, Georgia, and then the House of Peace in Jaffa commissioned by Simon Peres, the
two sculpture towers in Vienna, the cube cut by the light of the church in Foligno: thinking about the built but also about the ideas that have remained on paper, such as the staircase to Bethlehem imagined on behalf of Arafat, one could go on for hours. For every project there is a memory, an anecdote, a cinematographic quote ("To make good architecture you have to go and see good films"), an idea born years and years before. Fuksas talks about light, emotion, freedom, the future, and collectivity. "But if people ask me what my favorite project is, I answer that it is the one that will come," he insists, "because architects never come to terms with the past, they do so with the future." Innovation and challenges for tomorrow are in fact the concepts that come up the most in this conversation. And it is a reasoning that, as usual for the Roman architect, is linked to the themes and challenges of collective and global living, migration, the housing emergency, the "sublime" chaos of the new megalopolises, the landscape, health, ethics, to quote the title he chose in 2000 for his Architecture Biennale "City: Less Aesthetics, More Ethics". In short, the architect as an active protagonist of a complex society, committed to finding solutions to the problems and aspirations of collective living, from social inequalities to overcrowding and housing emergencies, pollution, traffic. Italy, he has been repeating for some time, should bet on "a Marshall Plan for housing, we need to demolish and rebuild, have courage and intelligence".
Insert caption
In fact, at the moment the big companies are done elsewhere: China, India, Saudi Arabia. "The Orient fascinates me, in Beijing we won a competition for a piece of the city," he says, but today's challenge is The Line, the linear city that is being built in Saudi Arabia within Neom, the new economic zone in the province of Tabuk, in the north of the country, between the Red Sea, the mountains and the upper valleys of the Hejaz. His is the only Italian studio involved in the project, his wife Doriana the only architect. The assignment is for three modules of what looks like a metropolis straight out of science fiction, all built vertically along a very narrow strip of desert 170 kilometers long but only 200 meters wide, with heights of up to 500 meters.
Insert caption
An "extraordinary" idea, a vertical city full of services and greenery, without cars and without traffic, with parks built up to 100 meters high. Designed to accommodate 9 million people by 2030, The Line will produce energy with the reflective walls of its buildings and will guarantee fast travel with a super metro capable of covering its entire length in just 20 minutes. And then? "Then I don't know, maybe what I still miss is a city of my own." On the birthday at the end he shrugs: "No big deal, we'll do something as a family". Big parties and budgets can wait.
All rights reserved © Copyright ANSA