Roots constitutes a critical exercise aimed at understanding how a universal language—one inspired by a specific place—can adapt to other contexts, balancing similarities and divergences with them.
The place determines a large part of a project’s identity. Although globalization has made us more homogeneous, aligning us with consumerist and spiritually hollow lifestyles, this frenetic world has also divided us and left us alone.
The closure of cities has generated small, individualistic clusters of dwellings that do not communicate with the outside—nor with the soul of those who inhabit them. Buildings that withdraw into themselves, declaring an identity detached from the place that hosts them. Buildings that do not speak, and do not move us.
Roots represents an experiment: on the one hand, the permeable filigree façades absorb the light and the gazes of those who encounter it. On the other hand, by placing it in different cities around the world, it demonstrates how a building absorbs the identity of a place and at the same time contributes to creating that place.
Even within the same city, two projects—though close to each other—appear different, because every place, in relation to architecture (and vice versa), has its own identity. A country, a region, in particular, has a precise identity: its own physical ecology. But it also has a human ecology that inhabits it. Our work is based on the analysis of these two ecologies.
Certainly, human ecology is less influenced by urban or contextual factors, but the difference is subtle. The reason we began this study lies in our curiosity to insert one of our projects—originally conceived for a specific context—into other realities around the world. We investigate the potential of repetition, of the homogenization of languages, doing so with a project in which we believe, because it highlights traits and characteristics grounded in a decade-long research on the studio’s architectural language.
The rationality and simplicity of the plans respond to professional practice shaped by market demands, as do the structural and physical aspects of the construction. Meanwhile, the expressiveness of this project is inspired by a repeated organic element that, through a filigree interpretation, retraces the succession of architectural expressions from a vernacular past, then classical, to a more organic present, and a future that will certainly be even more inspired by molecular sciences.
The effect of the repetition of the façade elements is calibrated to the scale of the intervention. This language convinces us because of its natural freshness and universality.
