Efficiency doesn’t mean sacrificing beauty – interview with Alfonso Femia

Monday, June 19, 2017

How is the way of living between innovation and sustainability, between efficiency and beauty changing? Alfonso Femia, architect co-founder of the "5 + 1" studio, will explain to REbuild, illustrating some of his projects and his most recent works that focus on the Mediterranean, the contemporary city, the dialogue with the subject, the existing heritage as a place of invention and innovation. “Our idea of architecture is to nurture the real with the imaginary, to practise the real by responding to needs and requests, but by giving the project a vision, a role, a story capable of constructing different worlds. In this way, we want to take our position from fashion or the cliché ‘daughters of time’ and reaffirm a style of architecture that obviously must be sustainable without this becoming the leit-motif that justifies everything, even what must instead be declared unsustainable and/or that diverts from true values architecture and design, must primarily build "happiness." Attention to legislation, design and technology can depress creativity, insinuating a new way of thinking and therefore designing a building that risks sacrificing beauty for the sake of efficiency. "The exasperation and repetition of the same inputs leads to ‘packaged products.’ In the preliminary design phase or concept, as the horrible way in which the foundational idea is defined, the project is replaced by the "already codified" idea that preludes to a "pseudo prefabrication of energetic and/or functional thought". And in the repetitive plot of the building, customs, rules and regulation, the spatial, architectural, urban and poetic invention is lost.

At the present time there is almost a degree of anxiety regarding the energy issues following a long period of indifference and "casual" building and the risk is to move from one extreme of energy user building to the other, repetitive buildings without soul or body."The overview for Femia is more than ever necessary today, as is the collaboration between all the players in the supply chain. "We need to constantly put in place a communication channel between everything that nourishes the project during its journey and the main players of the process, who may have different languages but must work for the unity of the project. It is the architect's responsibility to take charge of this action, it is the responsibility of the supply chain to get involved throughout the project. It is the responsibility of everyone to look at the path and its depths and not just at the surface of the result. The project must be able to build "happiness" responsibly.