House in Uehara – Villa Tugendhat

House in Uehara, Kazuo Shinohara, Tokyo, Japan

Villa Tugendhat, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Brno, Czech Republic

After coming to the conclusion that the most relevant and commonly shared value nowadays is experience, we sat together and shared our memories, thoughts, ideas about buildings we had seen and experienced or just found triggering as architects. We did this avoiding to look at plans and images, and translated our dialogues into sketches. The attempt of drawing existing buildings by heart, based on nothing else than experience soon enough lost any aim of showing things how they really are. We ended up bringing in fantasies, personal memories and perceptions, interpretations, desires, critiques and so on. A collection of fictional images grown out of experience of many existing buildings was suddenly on the table. It shows the ctional cores of these pieces of architecture beyond the limitations of reality, just as felt in person and stored in our head. What we found out is that how we see things and decode them into ideas and feelings is the fictional potential within the real world.

Andreas Amodio (1982) is an Italian architect based in Milan.He studied at the Academy of architecture of Mendrisio, USI, Switzerland, and graduated in 2007. He opened his own practice in 2008 and later on the same year became a teaching assistant at the Chair of Valerio Olgiati in Mendrisio. He taught and worked in Switzerland for over 7 years and in 2015 returned to Italy, where he currently continues his practice.

Mario Beeli (1983) is an architect based in Zurich. He studied architecture at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and graduated with Professor Christian Kerez. After graduating in 2009 he opened his practice. He has previously worked in the offices of Atelier Bow-Wow in Tokyo and Valerio Olgiati in Chur. From 2011 until 2015 he was teaching assistant for Valerio Olgiati at the Academy of architecture of Mendrisio. Currently he collaborates with different architects on various projects.

Giulia Furlan (1985) is an architect based in Mendrisio. She studied architecture at the Academy of architecture of Mendrisio, and graduated in 2009. After working in London and in Zurich, she founded her practice in Ticino. She currently is a teaching assistant at the Chair of Valerio Olgiati in Mendrisio and collaborates with different architects on various projects in Switzerland, France and Italy.

Having taught together in Mendrisio for four years, the three of them, each bringing in different yet compatible positions, have developed a common creative process.