Geninasca Delefortrie Architectes

This is not a book. As architecture, what you are holding is an unusual object that contains a multiplicity of situations and places. There’s room for reading, for vision, for comparison. This publication presents the APPROACH, the attitudes, and the architectural works of Geninasca Delefortrie as an opportunity to reflect in general on the relationship between architecture and its geographical, cultural, economic, and political context. You can run through the following pages in several ways. In accordance with its title, the book is structured like an open matrix of various elements. A polyphonic dialogue runs throughout the book, involving the words and viewpoints of many participants, who discuss the assumptions behind the practice of architecture, analysing the relationship between architecture and its context, between architecture and its clients, between public and private. It considers what the architect does, his work between programme and interpretation, the various planning tools at his disposal, and his end product: the shape and beauty of things. This wide discussion is illustrated by and imbued with the architectural works of Geninasca Delefortrie. Twenty projects are presented at length, each as a specific operation. These are put forward as concrete examples of how to clarify the ongoing relationship between architects, clients, contractors, public officials, and civilised society. A double page at the beginning of the book collects and compares all the principal buildings, presented according to the same parameters, in such a way as to bring out their richness of dimensions, the variety of functions, and the typological complexity that the architects have dealt with from 1995 to the present day. The independent judgements of five ‘critics’ complete the deliberation and help to define the character and qualities of the architectural approach that Geninasca Delefortrie works out in their creations. All these discrete elements are indissolubly interwoven among themselves: every theme for discussion relates to another aspect of the practice of architecture, projects can crop up in many parts of the book; attitudes and dialogues often return to the same argument, but always linking it to further aspects and insights. Alberto Alessi