What is the state of the art of museums in terms of architecture? 

The museum must necessarily reinvent itself in a logic that supersedes the exhibition schedule of the collection. In the post-communication society where the contents of our collective intelligence are entrusted to short videos, it makes little sense to imagine a museum that is limited to the exhibition. Several works of art – including the Mona Lisa, to name one – are taking on a new form in the NFT, thus losing their uniqueness. Therefore the museum intended as an institution found its end condition in the mere collection. Instead, the museum model should be reinvented. 

And what if we entrusted the museum with the logic of a supra-sensory experience? A catalyst of emotions, not a multimedia place ­– as already used to happen in the 2000s – but rather a place involving all the senses? This way, the museum would be able to tell about emotions. This is what we tried to do inside the MEI, the National Museum of Italian Emigration in Genoa, where visitors are immersed in a world completely different from ours. What MEI tries to tell with its architecture and design is the estrangement of the Italians forced to migrate, never returning back. It was a total uprooting that this museum in Genoa expresses, beyond the exhibition of objects. The museum institutions today should become this: the story of a total experience. 

The works of Gnosis progett include several archeological spaces and historic villas. What does it mean to work in places so steeped in history?

My master on this theme has been Marco Dezzi Bardeschi. Under his coordination we have restored Pozzuoli’s Tempio Duomo, a place of worship with a history of over two thousand years. He defined the project “a praise to the palimpsest” for its quality of entering without hesitation into the cultural heritage of the area and increasing its value of testimony. The idea of weaving praise through an architectural project is a reason that in my opinion can also extend to more recent architecture which lasts less than fifty years. When we are faced with ancient and therefore stratified works, however, it is necessary to pay extra attention, because it is necessary to analyze all the signs that history has left us in time.

Climate change and the EU's 2030 environmental objectives make sustainability a central theme of architetcural thinking. What has yet to be done? 

We believe that a great effort has already been made. In the seventies, for example, edifices were built that consumed about 150 watts per square meter per year. Today, we have to build NZEB – acronym of Nearly Zero Energy Building – structures, that is buildings with high energy efficiency, characterized by the use of renewable and high-performance plants. The concept of minimum environmental criteria has also been introduced. Now, what we should start working on is the life of buildings. By this I mean that we are building houses whose energy balance is designed over a period of 50 years. If I build with brick or tuff masonry, for example, it is true that I have a greater expenditure on the moment and that it does not have the same efficiency as a building made entirely of photovoltaic panels. However, it is a building that can live hundreds of years. Thinking about the long life of a building in relation to its energy and entropic balance is a complex discourse, but that would be worth developing.

How has the profession of architecture changed from its beginnings to today? 

Few people know that, before the separation between the architect and engineer roles, there was only one figure, that of the builder. What has changed since I started working in this sector thirty years ago is the emergence of hyper specialization. Today there are those who deal only with the hospitality sector, those who develop only residential villas’ projects and who only use BIM technology. I believe that this tendency to hyper specialization can be overcome by the logic of the team, where everyone makes his contribution within a body of common and shared ideas to return to what should be the ambition of all builders, namely to continue to entrust to the stones the role of witnesses of time and of the men who built them.