THE ROOM OF THE SOUL

Room. What is a room?
The room is everything!
The space of a room is everything!
For the mankind, everything is contained in the space of a room!
The room is, for the “thinking biped”, the summa of everything else! ... The room is, for the man, the first and most important space, the one that, more than any other, belongs to him and it better represents him than anything else! It is there, in its small and narrow space, that its well-being takes shape! It’s there that his body gets the necessary protection! It is in that hidden confined space that its soul finds comfort and that’s where its most intimate need for perfection comes true.
Among these needs of the man, far from being marginal, there is also the need to find himself in a harmonious space. It’s a space that meets the mankind’s need to extend its fragile and precarious existence as much as possible, even indefinitely.
We can finally say that the game is done only when the space shall satisfy this need, when its geometries are so many and such as to balance the material and immaterial elements which make it harmonic and conform the desired existence. Then, and only then, the work of the architect-man is fulfilled in every part.
This is a moment of sublime ecstasy for the architect, a moment of intense enjoyment. The architect can scream around to have won the most difficult battle in creating a work, when, finally, the formal result becomes clear, when the space discloses itself in all its beauty: to build becomes to rise up, to rise up becomes to create, to create becomes making art and, therefore, expressing shapes and shaping lògos.
You will rightly ask where does this “smoke salesman” is going with this? what does this weird teacher want to believe with this pun? And what is the meaning of this exalted and pretentious understanding of this job which is, all in all, a simple, banal, extravagant and disqualified profession?
I could answer to such a question by formulating an infinite number of concepts. They would all be valid and pertinent and they would all be able to let you know what architecture is and what the work of those who make it consists of, but, today, at the early age of sixty, I don’t want to mortify myself and, above all, to destroy in you, the pleasure of creating spaces and defining shapes. I just want, now, to make you understand how it feels to imagine and create architecture ...to do good architecture.
My only and most serious concern is now not to switch off in you every glimmer of enthusiasm and passion for an activity that is, often, conceived and transmitted, by many of my colleagues, as if it were the logical result of a pure and simple sum of "scientifically correct" data and concepts. These concepts actually do not belong to me anymore, even if I wanted to pretend to still appreciate the content, they have never been part of my DNA in fact, and they no longer warm my old scholarly heart, anyway.
Maybe I should say these words with some modesty, but at this moment of my life, I just want to have fun. I just want to let myself go and drag with me each of you and the entire Laboratory, like a new Pied Piper, into the saraband of creative pleasure, I hope not at the bottom of a ravine of free eccentricity.
Well, I suppose I might be charged with sentimentalism, mysticism, reductionism or, even worse, with corruptor of pure and naive souls, but I know it is not true. I know that at the end of the didactic experience beginning today, I won’t need to ask forgiveness for anything because I know where we're going and I already see the brilliant conclusion of your work, because I already know where my ramshackle, less scientific and maybe a bit scientist, teaching method will take you.
I know I am in good faith and on this, at least on this, I count to be forgiven for the innumerable misdeeds of which I will inevitably stain myself.

The theme
The chosen theme for the course is, for me, the most appropriate and effective for developing and completing the conglomeration of impulses and needs which keep man alive and constitute his impalpable epicentre: the soul.

An architect, above all of this, deals with the Space. That is the space of a room, meant for conforming and accommodating the "sublime and hideous beast" that is the soul. It is the space of a simple, banal, modest, close to nothingness: the room! ... The room of the soul ... precisely.
We will work (it will be a common work, a work in which we will all be engaged "soul" and "body", up to the end of our remaining forces) on the primitive space of architecture, namely the heart, or rather, the marrow of its figuration.
To design the room of the soul, we will have to appeal to all the most sensitive and little figurative essences, which the game of shapes gives us since ever and that our sensitivity, like for those who preceded us, shall select and seize.
In the short time we will have available, we will have to learn how to scream while whispering, to make low and high-pitched sounds, to feel the modulations of space, to imagine the tactile quality of the surface, to feel with our senses, like animals, the nature of the material: its colour, smell, taste, sound. And we should do this as if these were the first and the last design moments that our breath let us feel. As if it were the first and last moment of our existence. As if our presence on the sunny face of the earth had the breadth and transience of a delicate and feminine moth, of a plump and awkward “parpagghiuni” (big butterfly).
This and only this will have to be the room! This and only this will have to contain its walls!
In its eight meters wide, eight meters deep, eight meters high, there must be all the complications of the human soul, all the figurations of the man’s said or unspoken, palpable or volatile, heavy or refined, needs. And it doesn’t matter if the room of the soul will be dug with a miner's ice axe or engraved with a surgeon's scalpel, created with the approximation of bare hands or with the precision of a computer machine, emerging entirely from the ground or that it is completely hypogean, because what it really matters, is that it is! ... That it is a thoughtless void, a reasoned hollow, a fertile womb and, if possible, out of time and beyond time.
It will be hard, it will be difficult, it will be at the limit of human possibilities (as indeed it can only be all that has to do with art) but this, and nothing else then this, we will have to try to do. Whether we like it or not ... and despite.