White Noise / Na3 – Nicola Auciello

“Designing with poetry, building thanks to ideas and emotions’ power. The matter, whatever it is, is decidous and vulnerable, emotions are not. They are and remain, undestructable!”

This is what is written on Nicola Auciello’s roman office wall. Nicola is a young architect, and he’s glad for these words but at the same time is annoyed, because is strange beinging consired young architect for life, also after years and years of projects, realizations and work. This story tells, instead, of a mature architect who carries out a word research and plans, messages and stairs, meanings. “There’s a whole world behind“, tell us Nicola, isn’t just construction, there has to be an emotion.

And despite of difficult time we’re passing through, despite of companies, public and privates, costs, society, archistars and critics, Rome disorganization, we are able to reach a place inside the intricate architecture mosaic to put our pieces, one close to another.

Nicola chose his own way, chose to continue a path that he began even before architectural studies, and perhaps this is what has worked, not having abandoned himself for someone else.

We start from words, Nicola thinks are fundamentals, money are not enough and we switch to another matter, to find a balance. And it restarts from here, from the customer’s need to save money, working on the idea and when there’s no work, even if the company asks him to find someone who’s gonna buy that object. Nicola thinks about words and designs.

Design to provoke and test, and the research goes on, you do it just for fun, the passion is so great. Thanks to an idea born another one and those are Nicola’s words: “In this project we wanted to absolutely make the difference between exterior and interir, what I said before, speaking metaphorically of a person…a person may be outwardly beautiful, but inwardly empty, or otherwise. This chapel is over, because it’s a cube, a conceptual architecture. The speech is linked to the sacred architecture and in particular in the funeral ambit is an architecture that abounds in rich situations outwardly, but there’s coolness, marble inside, there’re, most of the time, cold situations, or classical solutions with doric columns. But here outside I see a cube, a simple solution, a situation that did not identify a specific religion, I find an artifact that is completely anonymous; I open this door and inside I need to have a world of emotions, an explosion of wealth, even on the roof. It should represent the wealth of peopl there were and there are no more“.

When we change argument, we are already inside this world of words and emotions and it’s clear that here architecture has the old taste of antique and research, the attention to the 20’s roman philosophy.

There’s irony in the projects we see: “Daytiles” seems a joke of time, despite a child messes up the parts. There’s attention to small things that goes with constant references to contemporary art, poetry, literature and there’re small things that together make a path.

One of the latest work was born in the street, among the people, it takes care of the city. It’s a project developed in collaboration with a company that takes care of innovative urban design, the intention was to give new incentives to people who live iin the city, capable stimuli of altering behaviour in the future at a urban level.

Five different projects was born and each designer with his language has interpreted this theme.

“Maybe in the north is different, we think that the house is ours and the city is yours, but who are the others and so we keep dirting it, we make it less beautiful that it should be“. From here the idea of giving a provocation: a totem to be seeded for the city provided with a broom, shovel and bags, with a sign that says: “This is an object that belongs to us, citizens and inhabitants of this place: it’s always the natural desire to keep it clean and tidy…and if someone will steal it? Anyone has an old broom and dustpan can give them back to the city and bring it here, the place and its people will be grateful“.

Territory presence, making architecture is not only making great works, everything becomes a urban scenario to work on. The contemporary Rome is a goal still far away, which can be attained in many ways, also with a bit of irony.

Before saying goodbye to Nicola, we ask something about his office and he answer: “Na3 is an office that loves what it does, it’s a young office that is working for twelve years“.

text by Giorgia Sborlino Garcia