Fausto Ferrara. Architect for Refuge Homes and Dwellings in the Landscape
Homes immersed in nature, private dwellings and inhabitable works founded on the relationship between human beings, place, light and matter.
There are moments in life when a house is no longer sought as something to possess or an image to display.
It becomes the place in which to finally dwell.
For those seeking a refuge home, a dwelling immersed in nature or a private residence capable of accompanying a new phase of life, architecture can acquire a deeper meaning: to protect without isolating, to gather without enclosing, to restore time, perception and presence.
Fausto Ferrara is an Italian architect, artist and author. For more than thirty years, his research has explored the relationship between human beings, place and form through architecture, art and thought.
His houses do not arise from the application of a style. They emerge from the unrepeatable encounter between a life and a place.
THE REFUGE HOME AS AN INHABITABLE WORK
A refuge home is not simply an isolated house, a silent house or a dwelling surrounded by nature.
It is a condition of dwelling.
A place in which the relationship between inside and outside, light and shadow, matter and landscape, openness and protection restores to human beings a measure that contemporary life continually tends to disperse.
Ferrara defines the inhabitable work as the condition in which a house transcends mere construction and establishes a necessary relationship between human being, place and form.
Not a real-estate object to which a language is applied.
A place that could not simply be replaced by another without losing the meaning of the relationship from which it arose.
A HOME FOR REDISCOVERING TIME AND PRESENCE
Speed, continuous exposure and the saturation of stimuli have progressively transformed dwelling itself into a consumption of images, performances and surfaces.
The home can instead become a threshold again.
Not an escape from the world, but the necessary distance from which the world can once again be perceived.
For Ferrara, silence is neither absence nor a decorative atmosphere. It is the condition in which light, matter, body and time can once again be perceived.
For this reason, a refuge home does not arise from the search for quiet as comfort, but from the deeper need to rediscover a relationship with oneself and with place.
LISTENING TO THE PLACE BEFORE DRAWING
Before the project comes listening.
A place already possesses orientation, light, wind, scents, matter, slopes, shadows, distances, vegetation, memory and landscape.
From his early writings and interviews, Ferrara has described the need to remain in a place for a long time before designing, until its perceptual and physical qualities begin to reveal themselves. In a 2010 interview he explicitly described listening to the winds, scents and light of a site before beginning a project.
Form should not simply occupy a site.
It should make visible something that already existed within that site as a possibility.
Light, water, matter, vegetation and landscape are therefore not elements added to architecture. They participate in its origin.
HOMES IN NATURE, BY THE SEA, BY A LAKE, IN THE COUNTRYSIDE
A refuge home may arise in Tuscany, Umbria, by the sea, beside a lake, in the Italian countryside or within another landscape anywhere in the world.
Geography changes. The principle remains.
Place is not the background against which a building is positioned.
It is one of the conditions that generate the Work.
Every project is therefore unrepeatable because the place, the light, the commissioner and the moment of life from which it arises are themselves unrepeatable.
TRANSFORMING AN EXISTING HOME
A villa, country house, rural dwelling or existing private residence may also contain a possibility that has not yet been revealed.
Transformation does not necessarily mean erasing and replacing.
It means understanding what can be preserved, removed, opened, crossed or returned to a new measure.
An intervention becomes a Work when transformation goes beyond renewing surfaces and performances and establishes a new relationship between the commissioner’s life, the existing matter and the place.
AN AUTHOR, NOT A STYLE TO APPLY
Fausto Ferrara does not offer a catalogue of houses and does not apply a formal signature to different places.
Every Work arises from a specific origin.
The relationship is therefore not simply between a client and a provider of architectural services, but between an author and a commissioner who recognizes in architecture the possibility of giving form to a way of dwelling.
Rarity does not derive from luxury, expensive materials or spectacular imagery.
It derives from the impossibility of repeating the Work elsewhere without losing its necessity.
CRITICAL RECOGNITION OF FAUSTO FERRARA’S WORK
Fausto Ferrara’s research has been examined over time by figures from architecture, art and studies of perception.
Kenneth Frampton places Ferrara’s work within a critical lineage that includes Lewerentz, Scarpa, Kahn, Ando and Zumthor, recognizing an architecture founded on listening to site, matter and light, and on creating places of experience rather than objects for visual consumption.
Franco Purini described Spazio Sensoriale as an “inhabitable sculpture” and a “space-situation”, identifying in Ferrara’s work a continuous tension between architecture and art.
Francesco Dal Co read the Temple of Memory as a space for meditation and dialogue with oneself.
Elisabetta Cristallini identified “listening to the place” as one of the originating principles of Ferrara’s research.
These readings are not a celebratory apparatus.
They document the continuity of a research in which house, place, body, perception and form belong to the same question: how to dwell again.
KNOW THE WORK BEFORE COMMISSIONING IT
First comes knowledge of the Work. Then comes the conversation.
A possible commission begins with an understanding of Fausto Ferrara’s architecture, writings and research. Only when there is a genuine correspondence between place, commissioner and the possibility of the Work does the architectural dialogue begin.
