MODOSTUDIO

16:30. Via Amerigo Vespucci, 24, a smiling Giorgio Martocchia opens the door and shows the place where MODOSTUDIO projects born.

A long luminous corridor, on the left a shelf with models, on the right officies, coloured glasses, computers, collaboratos, a work space for models production. Few minutes later we start to introduce us, around the big white table where are seated also Fabio Cibinel and Roberto Laurenti.

How was born in Rome an office like yours? How did you make up this team?

Giorgio: We all work with Fuksas, 9 years Fabio, almost 6 years Giorgio and 4 years Roberto and we know eachother since 2006. Went away from Fuksas we started with the competition activity and one competition after another we won our first, the International Port Terminal in Klaipeda, Lithuania.
Our group works because everyone has a specific skill: Fabio makes images, Roberto think about project and I’m the coordinator; a small team that covers all the knowledge of the design activity.
The mechanism that bends us, permitts us also to make 36 competitions in three years, almost one per month.
Roberto: Everyone cuts its space where with its 33% completes the common work. We create those mechanism that let us know where everyone’s skill arrives.
Fabio: Our gym was Fuksas’ office; during the four years together we specilized ourselves in what we do now. In a small view we can say to be a big office, with its communication section, its operative one on details and technics.

You’re a tested group, what space is reserved for the collaborations?

Giorgio: During the competition, we always try to create a local architects’ team that are able to read the project in a different way, because being local means knowing better the project area. For example “ExFonderie Modena” was designed with a local team (CCDP + arch. Sofia Cattinari), this permitt us to know something specific on historic memory. We were the only ones to think about preservation, to recovering it and to make just the coverage. We would not have done this without this input and perhaps thanks to this input we had success.
Fabio: Collaborating sometimes is a necessity, as for the two phases competitions; we are a young office for whom are reserved small competition, working with other offices give us the chance to partecipate to big competitions.

And in Rome? What is your opinion on working methods and on contemporary architecture’s role?

Giorgio: Rome is beautiful. (sarcastic tone) It miss a strategy, but not just in Rome, I’m talking about Italy, where anyone has clear ideas.
A specific analysis of the competitions’ brief shows how administration are focused on designing urban spaces or parks, nothing that has a relation with a serious territorial development.
I think is an important problem for the city’s growth. What will be Rome’s growth for the future? No one knows and we ask ourselves stupid questions about realizing skyscrapers or not…Just 10 years ago where you were driving around the GRA you could see big countryside areas, now there’s a confused magma.

text by Vanessa Todaro and Giorgia Sborlino Garcia