Interview with Carlo Berarducci

My studio is a small medium size architecture studio with up to 10 working stations that deals with a wide range of projects scales, from forniture design to interior design, from architecture until urban scale. My belief is that there is no difference in the design approach between each other. Architecture is about space, and interiors are the space of architecture, so I do not feel much difference when designing furniture, architecture or interior architecture.

I think design is intuition and solving data questions. May be a table or a residential building inside an historic context rather than a Congress Center or every thing else. Each project starts form the ever changing conditions at its base, site, client, budget, not budget, program, theme, images, memories, fascinations, from its match born an idea and the project go on staying on the original intuition.

I like working on any kind of scale and typology, but what I like more I think is designing single family houses, or better villas, I think residential spaces are the ones that best represent and interpret a way of living and are those who remains of an historic period and its behaviors, think about the black interiors of Oplonti Roman villas close to Pompei, or the 50’s and 60’s open villas of Palm Springs in California.

One of my favorite design is the project for an huge villa in Marbella, Spain. I love the idea of a very simple shape defining the place, the space under and around it and the building as a whole. The plot was an hill top facing the see, an the project consists only of two simple U-shape concrete beams rotated 90 degrees between one another. The first one is partially under ground and ends with a falling water originating from the indoor pool, the other one is like suspended over a water basin, the outdoor pool, with the leaving spaces fully open and unobstructed under its shadow, and the bedrooms contained inside its shape. Another one it is its opposite, a pool villa contained in four shipping containers joined together with the pool in the back container accessible from the roof and a fully windowed front with a porch.

My first realized project was my Degree thesis project for a Church, that in its intention was like a prototype for a repeatable church like the ones consacred to Maria in the Italian Renaissance, such as Santa Maria della Consolazione in Todi, a central plan project by Bramante, a kind of prototype fro San Pietro. So that, greating to my father, it become a commitment by the Vicariato di Roma, and was built in the east periphery of Rome called Torre Maura.

I love materials, their sensuality and tacticities, they could be natural or raw materials such as stone, wood, iron and concrete exposed with their natural textures, as well as industrial and technological ones like plastic or lacquered surfaces, fiberglas or carbon fiber.

In the weekend when I don’t have to stand behind the development of projects and construction sites.

Space. I think the main quality of architecture, interior architecture as well as new construction architecture, is the space, inside and around a building, the way you move inside and outside, how you approach, enter and discover it’s environments, the process of it’s future fruition.

I’m exited thinking about and dreaming about the space that take shape in mind, I get soon in love with the project idea.

Satisfied and proud if everything has gone well, less if there is something I have not be able to control and realize as I would have liked.

Space conformations, materials and light together with client needs satisfaction.

It’s general aspects, the feeling materials, colors, textures and space comunicate.

Good design makes people feeling better and living better. A well designed space for an apartment or a restuarnt rather than an urban development environment has the power to condition the way people fell and behave, architecture as well as interior architecture, that for me is the same, produce places to stay, the city we live in, and has the power to completely revitalize and bring people in part of a city that before was completely death, so it has to do with life and economy as well.

Design will always evolve and will always move between the field of arbitrariness and that of rationality, I prefer to stay in the field of rationality, and think about what Mies van der Rohe would have done and do not have done.

The last one was the A’Design Award exhibition in lake Como, and then in Chicago, where the project of Zen Sushi Restaurant won the golden award, and the next one will be the World Architectural Festival in Berlin where VDP Engineering Office is finalist in the Office category for the Office of the year award among other 15 from all over the world.

Images and memory. I have a visual culture, I often don’t remember names and facts but I remember images of them, they could be art works, materials and sensations seen around the world, and of course architecture of the heroic modernism as well the most recent one.

I avoid the search for a defined and repeated formal style, anyway what I search to reach is the most simple and linear solution, I try to solve the project with a single idea, a single sign or the fewer elements and signs it is possible to do. On the other side I like to experience the use of new materials, textures and colors or solutions without needs to be faithful to a style or a kind of repetition and recognizability. The approach start from the always changing condition you find on each project.

That is a good question. I live in Rome, in Italy. This of course affects the way to approaching design, the sensibility to the site, the context, how the project relate with what is around it, is innate, is something we consider also without thinking about. On the other hand Rome is one of the most difficult city to work in the field of architecture today, everything seems to be prohibited and contemporary architecture is very difficult to be realized with very few exceptions. The history of the city, whose main peculiarity is exactly the juxtaposition of its contemporaneities without interruptions from two thousand five hundred years, it is interrupted from the last 50 years, and this is a paradox in a city, unique in the world, where walking around you can see side by side buildings constructed in a thousand or two thousand years one from the other. And now, from only 50 years now this seems to be not more possible, but what is more it seems to be quite impossible also far away from the city center. The pro is that Italian design, with its sensibility to manufacturer and use of materials is still alive and very appreciated all over the world and is part of our identity and background.

It depends on companies, but the way I like more it is when there are clear and definite programs and budget while the project phase is delegate on a clear mandate..

The best way to work with any kind of client or companies is to begin with a very clear program as well a definite budget, any other thing is our skill.
The good designer is the one that work with program and budget given finding the best solution in terms of efficient use of space, and budget resourece adding anespected and unconsidered solutions and emotions.

I start with a visit to the site and a view to the site plans, then I start soon imagine a configuration, a sintetic idea, that could satisfy the program, after that will start a more definite phase where any aspect of the program is analized and discussed with the client and the project is modified until it reach a complete definition without loose its original vision, then follow a detailed phase to elaborate the executive drawings to make it built.

? I have a particular passion for armchairs, I like to design them and to collect too, I love 60’s and 70’s pieces that make the history of design such as the Joe Colombo armchairs, or Charles Eames ones as well as the latest ones gone on production.

I wake up early in the morning, together with my sons that have to go to school, but I like to be awake early also on holiday, then I start reading world news and architecture and design newsletters on tablet and then check the emails. At 9,30 I go to the studio that is downstairs of my home and make a plan of what to do, and what there is to do on every single projects the studio is carrying on, while collaborators arrive I share the program with them. Then probably I have to do built site inspections, or appointments with clients generally on the first afternoon. Then back in studio in the afternoon until the evening when I usually go to some art gallery openings or have dinners with my wife and some friends or clients, unless I stay at home and go to bed at 10 or so.

Just follow your instincts and passion, study or make a work experience in an international context, partecipate to international fairs or exhibitions and do not be afraid by any kind or size of projects, working on a small project or a big one is not so different, often in the small size there are more complexity and hard work to do.

I can’t immagine being anything else, being an architect or designer means identify life with work, and then work 24 hour, while in holiday included, every think and every where you are makes you think about something you can reconnect or take inspiration for the next project, and I like this. Sometimes I could need to stop thinking about design and for this reason I often love to go in old historic hotels when in holidays.

Being synthetic and seeing immediately the project as soon as I saw the place or the space of intervention.

To have a spatial vision, the power to see in your mind what will be built before it is. The most fascinating thing of this work is this dreaming dimension that make you live in the imagination of what could be built or be transformed and then brings it towards reality exactly as you have seen it in your first imagination.

Such as software, application, hardware, books, sources of inspiration etc.? Books, images, photos, and any kind of pen, then the studio will work with 2d and 3d programs to visualize the project and make it built.

I always do daily and weekly programs, and try to organize time around them together with my collaborators.

It depends on the kind and size of project, it is quite different if it is a furniture, an interior or an architecture design. In the first case the sketch design is the beginning and almost the end of the concept but then there is a lot of work to do until realize a working prototype, in the case of interior design the I’m very quick in seeing the new space and fix a layout, also designing process is not so long, may be around a month, the design a new building of course take more time depending also on the project size, could be from three to six months.

Always the next one.

Real Estate Company or investors in the field of real estate, hotels and restaurants owners, layers firms to renovate their offices or private clients to renovate or build new homes.

I like more working on single family as well as multifamily residential projects, or public interior spaces such us restaurants and hotels.

Among other projects I’m now working on a very nice and interesting project in Paris, a small new residential building inside a court in the cool Bastille neighborhood of Paris, where we will build a black steel and and natural wood building with a stunning duplex penthouse overlooking the Paris roofs.

I have a team and work with it in the developing phases of the project, but I use to reach too quickly the concept idea of the project to share it with others.

We are working on another nice project that is the wet area and treatment spa of an important hotel in Via Veneto in Rome, where the idea is to enter in a awash space with stone paths above the water that bring on one side to a whirlpool with stone bottom and stone side walls and on the other to the treatments rooms conceived as contemporary balinese timber house completely covered with timber walls and pavements.

Anyone can find my contacts on the studio website.

My dream? It is to build a simple box like small house on the edge of a cliff overlooking the ocean somewhere in Cornwall.