FAUSTO FERRARA. CONTEMPORARY VILLAS AS INHABITABLE WORKS
Private villas and contemporary residences for long-term living, generated through the relationship between place, light, matter, landscape, privacy and form.
A contemporary villa can be much more than a well-designed house.
Not an object to display, but a place capable of accompanying the life of those who inhabit it over time.
It can become the place where a life, a landscape and a form establish an unrepeatable relationship.
Fausto Ferrara is an Italian architect, artist and author. The private villa is one of the territories in which his research on dwelling can become a Work: not through the application of a style, but through listening to the place and generating a necessary form.
Every project arises from the relationship between human being, light, matter, landscape, threshold, measure and time.
Form is not chosen as an image. It is generated by the necessity of the relationship.
A VILLA BY AN AUTHOR, NOT A MODEL TO BE REPEATED
A villa by Fausto Ferrara does not arise from a formal repertoire to be applied to different sites.
Every Work has its own origin.
Topography, orientation, vegetation, distances, the path of the sun, water, wind, views and matter participate in the generation of form.
For this reason, two different places cannot generate the same house.
Architecture is not placed upon the landscape: it arises from a relationship with it.
The villa therefore becomes site-specific, belonging to the place that generated it and to the life it is called to receive.
LIGHT, MATTER AND LANDSCAPE SHAPE THE HOUSE
Natural light is not a scenographic effect.
It measures time, alters the perception of space, reveals matter and creates depth.
Matter does not simply cover form: it gives it weight, temperature, resistance and presence.
Landscape is not a view to be framed: it enters the structure of the Work through thresholds, openings, paths, shadows and proportions.
The contemporary villa arises from the relationship between these elements, not from their accumulation.
Light, matter and landscape become architecture when they belong to the same necessity.
PRIVACY AS A FORM OF SPACE
A private house must be capable of opening itself to the world without continuously exposing the lives of those who inhabit it.
For Ferrara, privacy does not arise simply from walls, screens or additional devices.
It arises from the form of space itself.
Distances, changes of level, paths, courtyards, walls, vegetation and sequences of thresholds can establish different degrees of openness and protection.
The house can therefore receive the landscape while at the same time radically protecting intimacy.
FROM THE CONTEMPORARY VILLA TO THE INHABITABLE WORK
Not everything that is built becomes Architecture.
A villa may be expensive, technically sophisticated, formally elegant and perfectly executed without necessarily becoming a Work.
Fausto Ferrara's theoretical research addresses precisely this threshold.
This is the core of the E9 Grid: distinguishing Architecture and Building, Work and Built, Place and Surface, Necessary Form and Image.
In the Inhabitable Work, function, place, matter, light, body and form cease to exist as separate elements and become parts of a necessary relationship.
The house is no longer simply the building in which one lives.
It becomes a form through which one inhabits the world.
A villa does not become unique because it is different from others.
It becomes unique when it could not have been otherwise.
AN AUTONOMOUS VOICE IN CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE
Kenneth Frampton places Fausto Ferrara's research within the critical tradition of tectonic culture, in a lineage that includes Lewerentz, Scarpa, Kahn, Ando and Zumthor.
But critical proximity does not imply stylistic belonging.
The decisive point in Frampton's reading goes further: Ferrara renews the lesson of the twentieth-century masters and, at the same time, transcends it, restoring architecture to its deepest essence: that of being an “act of truth”.
This transcendence does not consist in adding a new style to the history of architecture. It shifts the question from form as language to form as necessity.
It is precisely this autonomy that also informs the private house.
Not a villa “in the manner of”.
Not a variation on an already recognizable language.
A Work that must find its own form.
THE VILLA AS A PLACE OF EXPERIENCE
A house is inhabited by the body before it is perceived by the eye.
It is crossed.
It is experienced through temperature, light, shadow, sound, distance, the texture of matter and the relationship with the outside.
Ferrara's research originates in this perceptual dimension of architecture.
But perception is not the aesthetic end of the Work. It is the passage through which human beings can recover their own measure in relation to place, time and form.
Franco Purini recognized Ferrara as a true “architect-artist” and described Spazio Sensoriale as an “inhabitable sculpture” and a “space-situation”.
Elena Liotta highlighted the psychic and relational dimension of place and the role of sensory perception in the experience of the Work.
Francesco Dal Co read the Temple of Memory as the construction of a space for meditation and dialogue with oneself.
The same research extends into the house: architecture not as an image to be observed, but as a Work to be inhabited.
PRIVATE VILLAS AND RESIDENCES IN ITALY AND WORLDWIDE
Fausto Ferrara can conceive a villa or private residence wherever a place and a commission possess the conditions from which a Work can emerge.
The authorial origin of the project remains under his direct responsibility.
Ferrara generates and directs the Work.
Arckeo develops and coordinates the design process.
Local licensed architects, specialists and craftspeople translate the project into the regulations, approvals and construction methods of the country in which it is realised.
The local architect knows the regulations.
The contractor knows the construction site.
But neither can replace the author.
COMMISSIONING A VILLA BY FAUSTO FERRARA
A commission begins with knowledge of the Work before it begins with the request for a service.
Ferrara selects villas, private residences and transformations of existing buildings where the conditions exist for the development of a complete authorial work.
First, know the Work.
Then, we talk.
