Buildings,
and the ground
they sit on.

Our practice begins with the soil and ends with the cornice; the windows and the doors come in between. We have built forty-seven houses, all of them in Liguria or along the upper Tyrrhenian coast, and we have learned that the ground is the principal client. The owner asks for the house; the ground tells you whether it may be built.

We are slow. A house takes us three years between first walk and final coat of lime; some houses have taken five. We do not apologise for this, but neither do we wear it as a badge. It is simply how long the work takes when one is paying attention.

This monograph is the fourth in a series we publish every five years. It contains the work of the practice between 2014 and 2026 — forty-seven projects in all, of which we have chosen sixteen to record in plate and twelve to describe in word. The remainder are listed in the index at the end of the volume.

The plates are drawn by hand, by us, in pencil and India ink, on Fabriano cotton. They are not finished drawings; they are notes about finished drawings. The buildings themselves can be visited, on application, in Genoa and along the coast.

It is not a romantic conviction. It is a practical one. The materials of the old Ligurian coast were chosen by the people who lived there because they worked, in this climate, with these tools, on these slopes. They were chosen by trial over centuries. We have neither the budget nor the time nor the talent to do better.

We use lime mortar rather than cement because cement does not breathe and these old walls die when they cannot breathe. We use ardesia rather than terracotta because ardesia survives the libeccio. We use brass rather than chrome because brass goes brown rather than pitted in salt air.

None of this is, properly, architecture. It is keeping house. But we believe that keeping house is most of what an architect does, and that the rest follows from it.