This week we were fortunate enough to have Alfonso Femia of Atelier(s), a firm based out of Genova, with offices in Milan and Paris come visit us and give us a lecture on his works and prespectives on design and practice. Femia spoke about how his work is centralized around the ideas of time/light, visionary/inovative designs, feeling in architecture and the use of matter in his buildings. The logo to Atelier(s), a sperm whale, and Femia began his lecture with Herman Melville’s quote: “ waving and curling, and partially beneath a thin layer of water, also, the whales were swimming. Seen in advance of all the other indications, the puffs of vapour they spouted, seemed their forerunning couriers and detached flying outriders,” something many of us recognized from our lectures in Val’s theory class on literary and architectural theory. Femia included in his slides many of his built and unbuilt projects, his most notable of which included the BNP building in Milan, The Marseilles Docks projects in France, and the Dallara Academy in Varano de’ Melegari. His presentation style and his design focus seemed to strongly emphasize representation and his slides included many precisely composed photographs of his works as well as a number of finely edited video montages of experiences, views, and details of the spaces. This way of presenting his work really reflected his attitude towards architecture/his projects as “not an act of service, but an act of feeling” and the ‘journey’ being a combination of architecture and feeling. Overall the images he presented were captivating and the content he spoke about stimulating. Many thanks to Alfonso Femia for taking time to come speak to us.
