Yacademy Podcast - Season 2 Transcriptions: Ugo Morelli, Marco Ferrario, Paolo Capponcelli
The following transcripts are adapted rather than literal translations, allowing some flexibility to preserve the meaning and conversational flow of the original dialogue.
S02 EP04. Reading Space, A Cognitive Perspective | A conversation with Ugo Morelli
by Vittorio
Italian to English Transcript:
Welcome to Voices Beyond Architecture, a podcast that explores how space is perceived and experienced through emotions and the senses. I’m Vittorio, a student at the Academy in the Architecture for Exhibition program, and today we have the pleasure of being joined
by Ugo Morelli, professor of cognitive science and psychology, who for many years has explored topics such as livability, aesthetic experience, and creativity within human and environmental contexts.
Welcome, Professor Morelli. Thank you very much for being here with us today.
Starting from your strongly interdisciplinary background, we’d love to talk about how you personally perceive space, and how through your work you explore and activate the sensory and emotional dimensions of experience.
But we like to begin from afar, so I’d like to ask you to share a memory of a space that touched you deeply—perhaps something connected to your childhood or a moment from your past.
Thank you.
Well, as you were asking the question, I started thinking through associations, and a place came to mind that I used to visit when I was a child.
It was near our countryside home in Irpinia. In those years we would spend some time there, coming from Naples. The area itself is particularly interesting from a landscape perspective—an agricultural territory with a small stream. At one point the stream creates a kind of inlet, and on the left side—if you follow the direction of the water—there’s a fountain.
But it’s very different from what we normally think of when we hear that word. There’s actually a spring emerging directly from the earth. The local farmers had only slightly channeled the water using the bark of an oak tree. This created a small trickle of water that flowed into a clear little
pond.The whole place was surrounded by brambles. In spring and summer, when they bloom and grow wild, they create a space that feels strangely magnetic.
As a child, I turned this place into something sacred—a place that sparked my curiosity, my imagination, and my fantasies.Years later I realized how much that experience shaped my life. Because it was there that I began imagining that I had arrived on Earth from another planet, that I had been brought here and entrusted to my parents.
But more importantly, I imagined something that later became central in my thinking about myself: the idea of multiple identities.
That eventually led me to question the very concept of identity itself. Today, neuroscience and psychology show us that we don’t carry a single fixed identity. Instead, we are constantly undergoing a process of becoming, branching in different directions. In every situation these directions multiply, shrink, change.
We are alive precisely because we are always becoming.
In fact, in a book written with Vittorio Gallese titled What Does It Mean to Be Human, we coined a new word: “dividentity.”
In that place, I imagined myself as the holder of many different versions of myself. I even imagined that my parents had made an agreement with the whole world to falsify the mirrors so that I could never see what I truly looked like.
I imagined that mirrors showed me a constant image, but that this image wasn’t real. Because of that, I often returned to that place, waiting for the water to become perfectly still, believing that by looking into it I would finally see my true reflection.
And each time I was disappointed, because I looked exactly the same as in the mirrors.
Eventually I even imagined that the spring itself must be magical—that it had been altered too, as part of this grand conspiracy against me.
That fantasy later gave rise to many reflections, especially about the relationship between landscape, identity—or “dividentity”—and the psychological and cultural pluralism that defines us.
Hearing this makes me think of something. I’m from Campania as well, from Caserta, so during my studies I’ve often interacted with the reality of Naples. In a city like Naples, places often take on symbolic meanings—even spaces that might seem insignificant to others.
For example, a small corner of a street might become deeply meaningful. People almost sacralize these places. In Naples we often say that the alleyways are like small towns of their own, with a kind of living identity.
You mentioned the area around Avellino, and that reminded me of something I’ve often encountered in my research: unfinished architecture. When I’ve shared this research, especially in parts of Italy, I’ve noticed a kind of collective habituation to unfinished structures.
Since we architects believe that built space—beyond architecture itself—can influence collective psychological and cognitive processes, I was wondering: from the perspective of your discipline, what tools or insights could architects translate and use to activate new possibilities in how spaces affect people?
You see, over time we have built an idea of the human mind as something like an impregnable ivory tower—fixed, stable, always the same.
In fact, people often think it’s a virtue not to change their minds. Someone who changes their mind is often criticized.
William Blake, the great English Romantic poet, wrote something that has always stayed with me. He said: “The man who never changes his mind is like stagnant water—it breeds reptiles in the mind.”
This poetic intuition is confirmed by research.
Our brains are neuroplastic. By the end of this conversation, neither your brain nor mine will be exactly the same as they were at the beginning. The changes are extremely small, of course—so small we cannot perceive them—but they are real.
We are alive because change is happening.
And beyond neuroplasticity there is epigenesis, which means that even our genes are not fixed. Experience and learning continuously shape our biological and mental structures.
We are porous to the environment.
This realization carries enormous responsibility for anyone who designs space.
An artifact—a building, a space—doesn’t simply sit there as a formal object. It transforms the person who experiences it.
Whether the artifact is finished, unfinished, or poorly made, it still acts upon the person experiencing it.
This raises an interesting question about unfinished architecture. In places like Calabria or Campania we often ask: how can people who live there not see that something is unfinished?
But the truth is that we humans rarely see things clearly. Often we simply don’t see. And sometimes we don’t even realize that we’re not seeing.
Reality itself shapes how we perceive it. The psychologist James Gibson called this affordance—the idea that environments suggest or guide certain ways of perceiving and acting.
And as Lambros Malafouris says: “Things shape the mind.”
Our minds are neuroplastic, and they are shaped through embodied empathy with space.
This empathy is not inherently good or bad. It is simply the resonance that occurs between ourselves, others, and the world around us.
This is where responsibility comes in.
In a research project published in a book I edited called Landscape as Mother Tongue, we studied how children develop their understanding of landscape.
What we discovered is exactly what the title suggests.
Just as children learn their mother tongue simply by growing up within a community of speakers, they also learn the language of the environment.
Within a year, children develop complex verbal language simply because they participate in a community where language exists.
The same thing happens with space.
We incorporate the environment. Our minds are not only embodied—they are also embedded. The context we live in shapes what becomes possible for us to perceive, think, and feel.
And naturally, we incorporate the quality of the materials and environments around us. If we are surrounded by unfinished or poorly made spaces, those conditions become part of us as well.
Recently I visited Paris to see a Gerhard Richter exhibition at the Fondation Louis Vuitton. The building itself, designed by Frank Gehry, is one of his latest projects.
As often happens with Gehry’s work, it presents an explosion of fragmented forms—a spatiality that can be difficult to place within a harmonious perceptual system. It’s intentionally disorienting.
With all respect to the architect, this kind of highly conceptual design can sometimes generate disorientation for visitors.
Of course, disorientation can be intentional and meaningful. Think of Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, where the fractured geometry deliberately creates a sense of disorientation that evokes the trauma of the Holocaust.
But in general, creative architectural processes must establish a good relationship with the experience of those who inhabit the space.
Otherwise, we might as well still be living in caves.
For example, today I’m working with young architects on the design of educational spaces.
How can we design classrooms without understanding something basic about how humans learn?
Eye contact, for instance, is fundamental for learning. If students are arranged so that they can see each other while discussing and working together, learning is strengthened.
But in many classrooms students only see the back of the head of the person in front of them, and the entire structure revolves around looking at the teacher speaking.
That model is based on two principles that are enemies of learning: passivity and one directional communication.
So anyone designing educational spaces should understand how the human mind learns. This is what I mean when I talk about the empathy of space.
Architectural design should take into account perception, ergonomics, and the shared experience of multiple users.
It’s extremely interesting to think that seeing a landscape—whether natural or architectural—can be like learning a language.
Returning to unfinished architecture, we are often born into these environments, we live in them, and we absorb them. Perhaps this is why people become accustomed to degradation or incompleteness.
At the same time, sometimes unfinished architecture is almost monumentalized. Yet from the public’s perspective these attempts to sacralize unfinished structures or “monsters” of development are often simply seen as ugly.
Since you also study aesthetic experience, I’d like to ask you quite directly: does ugliness exist?
Yes, ugliness exists in relation to aesthetic canons.
But if we think of aesthetic experience only as a matter of formal criteria, we miss something deeper.
The word aesthetic comes from the Greek aisthesis, meaning sensory perception.
Aesthetic experience arises from the sensitive structure of the perceiver—us, as human beings—who interpret signals from the world through our senses.
Of course these signals are interpreted according to cultural canons. Art history shows us how these canons constantly change.
When the Impressionists first exhibited their work, people threw rotten vegetables at them. Today people wait in long lines to see those same paintings.
But staying at that level isn’t very interesting to us.
What interests us is the natural foundation of aesthetic experience.
For this reason, we distinguish between the aesthetic and aesthetics.
The aesthetic is something that every object and every being in the world emits. I have an aesthetic dimension. So do you. So does this table, this microphone—everything.
These elements evoke something within us, and we translate that evocation into experience through our sensitivity.
This means there is an aesthetics of relationships.
And this idea is crucial today, because it relates to the livability of the world.
Humanity has historically adopted a Promethean attitude toward the world—seeing it primarily as something to use and dominate.
But we forget that we are part of a living system.
An aesthetics of relationships reminds us that we are water, air, soil—the very elements that sustain our existence.
To move in this direction, we must redefine the concept of beauty.
Today beauty is still often treated like cosmetics—something superficial and external.
But from our perspective, beauty is the result of embodied resonance in our relationships with others and with the world.
When I listen to a Chopin nocturne for the hundredth time and feel something new, I’m not just discovering something about the music. I’m discovering something about myself.
The experience allows me to feel parts of myself that I wouldn’t otherwise perceive. In this sense, aesthetics extends beyond art to encompass the entire experience of living.
And if humanity has a future on this planet, it will depend on our ability to develop this aesthetics of relationships with the world.
Returning to your childhood story—what would you say today to that little boy who went to the fountain and imagined all those worlds?
I would thank him.
Because that imaginative experience stayed within me like a kind of yeast—it helped me interpret the world.
That tiny ecosystem, which at the time seemed almost insignificant, resonated with me in a way that laid the foundations for something deeply formative.
It became a field of learning for me. So I’m grateful that I experienced it in that way—even with the restlessness it created.
And I’ll conclude with a quote from Georges Braque:
“As long as we remain restless, we can remain calm.”
Thank you very much!
Thank you.
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S02 EP06. An engineering career with influential architecture studios | A conversation with Marco Ferrario (Progetto CMR)
by Giuliana
Giuliana: Welcome to Voices Beyond Architecture, a podcast in which we explore what lies beyond what we see, observing how space is perceived, felt, and emotionally experienced, often even before it is consciously understood.
In each episode we go beyond form and function to listen to the people and stories that, in subtle ways, shape our way of inhabiting, moving through, and relating to space.
I am Giuliana uliana Staselli, and today we are here with Marco Ferrario from Progetto CMR. To begin this podcast, I would like to ask you how you chose architecture, how you started this career, and how you eventually decided to join Progetto CMR.
Marco: Well, first of all, I should say that I am originally an engineer. I also tried to study architecture, although I never actually completed that path. However, my passion has always been, since I was a child, connected to the built environment. Walking around the city I would look at buildings, construction sites, things being built, almost like when children play with Lego, and I was already fascinated by it.
Fortunately, during my school years I had the opportunity to meet Massimo Roi. Where did you study? In Milan. From elementary school to middle school and high school, we studied together. We even lived on the same street, so we knew each other very well.
Then we arrived at the moment of choosing university. At that time I was more interested in seeing things built rather than designed, so I decided to study engineering. There was also a very specific specialization in engineering at the time. I am in fact a civil engineer with a specialization in construction technology and building engineering.
That program existed only for a few years and was mainly about organizing construction sites, building processes, and industrialization in construction. After graduating, I immediately started working with construction companies, initially smaller ones.
Giuliana: For example?
Marco: For example some local companies in Lombardy, already of considerable size, and later I worked for the Caltagirone Group, contributing to projects that included the construction of thousands of housing units.
Giuliana: And what did you like most about that work?
Marco: What I liked most was that I have always been a very curious person. I really wanted to understand how things are built. On construction sites I would often even try to learn how to use machinery like excavators.
Giuliana: Why?
Marco: Because I wanted to understand the limits and challenges of the people working there. Often my goal was to control both costs and construction time, but on construction sites that is very difficult to achieve, because a construction site is not like a factory.
What interested me most was the possibility of controlling the construction process, including aspects related to industrialization and the introduction of digital tools. These were the early days when PCs started to be used. The transition from mainframe computers to personal computers was happening, and having a computer as a working tool was becoming increasingly common.
At one point I was working as a consultant for a construction company, and Massimo Roi had designed a project. So we found ourselves on opposite sides of the same project: he was the designer and I was on the side of the construction company responsible for building it.
During construction we realized that the project had several shortcomings—not necessarily in the typical aspects of design, but rather in how that design translated into the practical activities required during construction.
So we started discussing this and asking ourselves: how could this be done differently?
At that time the process worked like this: the architect would create the design, then pass it to the structural engineer, who would return it; then it would go to the systems engineer, who would send it back again. It was a continuous loop of drawings that didn’t really communicate with each other, and this often caused serious problems on site.
So we said: why don’t we try to do something together that could lead to a more integrated and complete project?
At that point I temporarily left the world of construction, although I knew it would only be temporary because projects always eventually return to the construction site, through construction management and supervision.
So we founded a company that initially moved from architecture toward engineering. Since I had studied engineering and knew many professionals in different fields, we brought several specialists together and created a multidisciplinary structure.
Giuliana: And I would also like to ask about your experience working with Pritzker Prize–winning architects, because that is truly remarkable.
Marco: Yes, that was another stroke of luck. I think you need two things: knowledge on the one hand, and a certain humility on the other, practical humility.
I was fortunate to collaborate with several Pritzker Prize winners who, although they are often considered “starchitects,” are also very human. When they recognize competence on the other side, and what may sometimes appear as determination or ambition to achieve a goal, they are able to find the right balance.
I have always been somewhat of a project manager. Sometimes that term can sound negative, but I see it as a strength because it allows me to anticipate what might happen and understand which decisions could later require redesign.
Working with them I learned an enormous amount. I believe many Pritzker Prize architects have a particular ability: the capacity to visualize the project in advance, to already see what the final object will become. Until that moment I had never really thought about anticipating things to that extent.
Perhaps the combination of my understanding of what happens later during construction and their design vision allowed us to work extremely well together. We developed mutual respect and we are still in contact today.
Giuliana: If you had to mention one project you particularly loved?
Marco: Honestly, the first project I worked on with Grafton Architects. It was my first experience working with architects who later became Pritzker Prize winners, they were not yet Pritzker laureates at that time.
But the recognition itself is not really the point. Awards come naturally over time, as a result of a career and what someone demonstrates through their work.
I remember that experience as very relaxed and collaborative. Sometimes we would almost draw together, and when we were on site we even sketched directly on the walls to define details.
That experience gave me a deeper respect for architecture. Architecture is not only about form or function; it also has a social dimension and many layers of meaning. Only people with a very broad vision are able to convey all of that.
Working with Renzo Piano was also extraordinary, partly because he is an exceptional person. We quickly developed a strong understanding, and sometimes he would even send me sketches via WhatsApp, which was incredible. I still have all of them. I also own several of his signed books, and every now and then he sends me one for my birthday.
Giuliana: To conclude, looking toward the future: how do you see yourself in the coming years as an engineer?
Well, aside from retirement, which is never really the goal for someone passionate about their profession, I would say that what I would like most is to find a way to transmit what I have learned.
I have had the fortune to work with Pritzker Prize winners, with major construction companies, and on monumental projects. Sometimes I worry that I might not be able to fully pass on what I have experienced and the passion I have for this profession.
A few years ago, when we moved into our new offices, we created an Academy, initially intended to train the people who work with us. Then COVID arrived and the project slowed down.
I also believe that the tools we use to transmit knowledge must evolve. It’s not only about younger generations; it’s simply that the traditional lecture format loses its effectiveness very quickly.
So now I am trying to understand what the right tools might be to share this experience, perhaps through new educational formats, maybe even through a startup focused on this idea. That could become a future goal for me, something different from the very intense work rhythm I have today.
Giuliana: Well, thank you very much for this conversation. It’s an honor for us to have you here, and we look forward to seeing you again in another episode, at another moment during Yacademy.
Marco: Thank you very much!
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S02 EP11. Translating Stories into Exhibition Space | A conversation with Paolo Capponcelli (Panstudio Architetti)
by Vittorio and Victoria
Italian to English Transcript:
Welcome to Voices Beyond Architecture, a podcast that explores how space is perceived and experienced through emotions and the senses. I’m Victoria and I’m Vittorio. two students at the Yacademy in the Architecture for Exhibition program, and today we’re really happy to have a special guest with us.
Today we’re here with architect Capponcelli — thank you so much for being with us. First of all, could you introduce yourself to our listeners? Who are you, and what do you do?
Sure. I’m part of a studio called Panstudio Architetti Associati. We’ve been working together since university — since our degree years — and along the way we’ve had different professional experiences. Personally, I started out as an urban planner, then worked as a more “general” architect.
But little by little, thanks especially to our connection with Professor Andrea Emiliani and architect Glauco Gresleri — key figures in the cultural scene of Bologna — we slowly entered the world of exhibition design. Because there’s always a need to create exhibitions, to build displays, to make spaces for storytelling. And from that moment on, we started working in this field — and in practice, it’s been almost fifty years now that we’ve been operating in exhibition design.
The very first exhibition I worked on was connected to the Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau by Le Corbusier. There was a consortium of companies — I was very young then, probably younger than you are now — and I was commissioned by architects Trebbi and Zachiroli (Zachiroli was a very important architect in our city) to design this first installation.
My job was to connect the products of the companies in this cultural consortium — because it wasn’t only commercial, it was also about research and documentation on living and dwelling.
And for the first time, I felt the thrill of having to bring spaces together, organize colors, make choices — and from there it all became one continuous path. Today I have much more experience, of course.
We like to start a bit “from far away” in this podcast. So the first question we often ask is: can you share with us a memory of a space from the past that moved you deeply? Maybe it was that first exhibition… or something else?
I have to say, the exhibition setup that I’m most emotionally attached to is probably the one we did for Edward Hopper.
Hopper is that great American painter you all know — famous for those 1930s interiors, he’s incredibly well-known. And for me he was a myth.
Because to design exhibitions well, you need an interdisciplinary culture. If you don’t know things, if you don’t study, if you don’t love music, for example — you won’t become an exhibition architect. That’s certain.
And really… this applies to architects in general, too.
I was genuinely moved because as a teenager I loved Hopper, I already knew his work well — so being asked to design the exhibition for the first time for this major painter was deeply emotional for me. The show was installed at Palazzo Reale in Milan. Palazzo Reale is probably one of the Italian institutions that produces the most exhibitions overall — sometimes very high quality, sometimes less so — but it’s an intense exhibition machine, let’s call it that.
So why did Hopper move me so much? Because I knew his painting language intimately.
Hopper has, in a way, two phases: an American phase — he’s deeply American, he lives there, rooted in his land — but as a young man he went to Paris, like a formative “apprenticeship journey.”
And you can see it in the paintings: if someone doesn’t know Hopper, they can still notice the difference. The American paintings often have these blue skies, very strong light, sharp cuts of sunlight. But the European paintings — the Paris works — have mostly grey skies and a different atmosphere.
That difference became the basis for our color choices.
And how do you choose color? In our case, we often use carpet (moquette) to shape a space — it’s relatively affordable and it creates the effect you want. So in my head, I started placing these colors: blue, light grey, ochre…
And then I had an idea: to break out of the cliché of “floor here, wall there” — and instead make the space feel like one continuous, unified environment.
So as the exhibition sections unfolded — because as you know, exhibitions are structured in sections, usually four or so — I would introduce the appropriate colors section by section.
For example, the carpet might be blue — and then I would let that color climb up the wall, so the traditional idea of “place” dissolves.
Because in exhibition design, you’re always working in the most varied contexts: an old palace with interconnected rooms, or one large open space where you need to build an entire narrative environment.
At Palazzo Reale, it’s a sequence of rooms, but fairly large rooms. And the rooms were transformed by this idea. Of course, there’s always the exhibition wall with a painting, and then from that comes a graphic logic — the same language continues vertically on the wall where you place the text, captions, what’s needed.
The emotion was strong — and the impact was strong too. The show was successful because you could feel that Hopper was “inside” the exhibition design as well.
I could keep going — I’ve had so many emotional experiences with exhibitions.
That actually leads to a really interesting theme: color. Looking at Panstudio’s work, color seems like a signature for you — you use it a lot. When we build an exhibition, we’re trying to tell something — we architects use a language to translate ideas into space.
In your experience at Panstudio, is color one element of this alphabet — or is it the alphabet?
It’s a part of the alphabet. And that alphabet is made of at least two major elements: the exhibition structures, and color.
Color is very important — especially to mark sections — but it also shapes the visitor’s first impression when they enter. It can make them feel welcomed, wrapped, held.
The main thing, though, is always the structural layout you give the exhibition.
When someone commissions you to design a show — let’s say a graphic exhibition — you have to immediately think: what is the general idea? What hits you? What’s the feeling?
You absolutely cannot begin with a checklist of works and try to fit them “nicely” into a route, like: “Here are the forty works of section one.” That’s wrong.
You need a strong overarching idea. What do you love? What do you see immediately? What emotion does it give you to design, for example, an exhibition on traditional and modern Japanese graphic art?
At a certain point, your own world comes into it — your own Japan, which becomes richer if you’ve traveled there, read about it, studied it, looked deeply.
The first thing that came to my mind was Issey Miyake. To me he’s one of the greatest Japanese designers of all time. And what fascinated me was the concept of pleating — folding, the flexible folded element.
So I focused entirely on that. You can’t think of a thousand things — you have to find one strong thing you truly feel inside, and then you “decline” it through the whole exhibition.
That’s the method.
That exhibition had four sections: nature, figures, the sign/mark, and Japonisme.
For nature, you think: what color? What atmosphere? And of course you also look at the works — you flip through them.
And here’s a secret: sometimes things align by chance. In that show, I discovered that the color I chose ended up appearing in many of the posters — almost accidentally. But it makes sense: a tone between green and blue just worked.
Then there was the section about figures — people, women, love, faces, caricature — and this violet emerged. And if you noticed, the exhibition changes: the pleating concept remains, but in the first section the walls were very tall.
Because if you have a tall space, you work with height — you don’t compress it. If you compress a tall space, it feels poor, reduced, weak. But if the space is tall — what luck. Use the height.
Then the “sign” section — in Japan, black on white is the sign. So I used black. Even the video in that section was black and white.
And Japonisme — Japan is red. The flag is red. Yes, it’s a stereotype, but it helps — and in the end, it works.
And another important point: an exhibition is made of two things. There’s the museological project — the curators’ narrative — and the museographic project — the architects’ spatial translation.
Sometimes curators are brilliant, sometimes less so. Sometimes architects are brilliant, sometimes less so. You have to keep these roles distinct, and do your part with a lot of commitment — even stubbornness — but the most important thing is that the curators build a show where the artworks actually tell a story.
Exactly — there has to be a story.
Because if I take the Impressionists from the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and bring them to Italy just to make money — because people will always go see the Impressionists — that’s business, not an exhibition.
An exhibition means bringing works together — from different places, with huge costs, transport, logistics — to create one story that grips you. It should feel compelling, like a great film. Even if you’re tired, a great film wakes you up and you watch from beginning to end.
If an exhibition is boring… it’s boring. And often it’s not only the artworks — the environment itself matters. The atmosphere matters.
You’re touching on something really important: the curator creates a narrative that links the works, and our job is to translate that into an exhibition design that offers it to the visitor — without damaging the quality of the works themselves.
In your experience, what’s the recipe — beyond color and exhibition structures? How does an architect find the “knot” that tells the curator’s story, and also carries the architect’s voice?
I don’t think you should worry about that too much. If you’ve read the curatorial project well, if you’ve absorbed it, if you’ve truly entered the world of the works — their scale, their presence — then it will come.
Because curators often don’t really visualize how the exhibition will look. Sometimes their mental image is even misleading.
What matters is that you listen — and not only to the curator. In an exhibition, there isn’t only the curator. There’s also the client — public or private.
If the client is public — like Palazzo Barberini, for example — you also deal with an entire team of technicians. They will ask for accountability, especially around safety. Because exhibitions attract huge crowds.
So the installation has to respond to the curator’s needs — like: “I want the sculptures visible in the round, not against a wall, articulated in space.” But then the technical team might say: “Careful, people will bump into them.”
You gather all this information — but you must not forget your own creativity. If you only solve functional needs, you won’t make a beautiful installation.
For the Bernini exhibition in Rome, for example, we developed these inclined structures. They felt like rationalist rocks — clean cuts, surfaces where you could place a work at a precise height.
And that inclination matters: it means you avoid creating a flat base that people can climb or sit on. If you put a platform at 50 cm, people sit on it. You need the exhibition to be beautiful, powerful, safe — and not usable as a bench.
In the end, those forms worked. Everyone appreciated them. Visitors could get very close to the artworks, almost close enough to touch — but the shape itself gave you a subtle feeling that you shouldn’t. Form guides behavior.
And again, color: in the Bernini exhibition there was a duality — the first part with those inclined grey structures, like a system of peninsulas inside the rectangular space.
Then later sections were focused on busts — and busts are meant to be seen mostly from the front. So there we created curved walls. Curves echo the Baroque. And they allow you to group related busts: French busts, Barberini family busts, and so on.
And curves create beautiful lighting conditions too — you never see a surface as completely uniform; it’s always softly graduated because of geometry and physics.
So yes — all these elements work together.
And one more thing: you have to draw by hand.
You’re young, you belong to a generation that naturally wants to start directly on the computer, and I understand it. But in my experience it’s hard to form certain ideas without early sketches.
So I always encourage young people: don’t forget drawing. Even if you think you draw badly — drawing isn’t ugly. It’s just drawing. And it helps you express yourself.
That’s actually the perfect lead-in to our final question. We like to return to the past to close the episode. You spoke about a child who observed petals, light and shadow — and that became the beginning of your path.
With all your experience today — after the first exhibitions too — what would you say to that child, or that young architect?
Honestly, I’d say to you — because to me you’re the young ones now — that everything begins with curiosity.
If you’re not curious, truly curious — even about the most ordinary things — you won’t go far.
I remember I was a child in the 1950s. Our schoolbooks were different, but even then there was still a trace of modernity and the historical avant-gardes in graphic design.
The people who designed the books were often young, and you could feel they wanted to express something in a cover — and even a book cover is a kind of exhibition design.
I remember these textbooks — we called them “sussidiari,” the books with everything inside: literature, math, history. And I remember a cover that was a fading yellow.
And I would ask: why did they do this? Why not put a face, or a landscape? Why this strange cover?
That curiosity connects to graphic design — and graphic design is incredibly important in exhibition design, just as important as light.
So I would investigate. I would open the book and search. I’d see that a drawing was “taken from…,” but I didn’t even know who that person was — I was a child.
Later in life I had the opportunity to design a major exhibition for that very artist at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome.
So if you don’t have a drive toward the arts — not only visual art, but literature and music too — you lose something fundamental.
Music, especially, is essential.
I was not a wealthy child, but I was lucky: in my region, people did cultural things. I remember the first time I was taken to the municipal theatre. I heard the overture to La gazza ladra by Rossini, and the dances from Prince Igor.
As a child, these experiences imprint themselves in your mind — you don’t lose them. You remember harmony.
And here’s another secret: I still draw from life, even when I go to the theatre. I draw while listening to music — with little notebooks like these.
Because drawing means understanding proportions, distances, flow. It reminds you that a path can become too tight, that circulation must be fluid.
If you don’t test these things every day with yourself, you risk designing spaces that simply don’t work.
Thank you!
Thank you