Marco Belpoliti and Paolo Rosselli cinematically read the latest creation of Massimiliano Fuksas, the Ferrari Product Development Centre at Maranello. Text by Marco Belpoliti. Photography by Paolo Rosselli.

In the middle of the courtyard we climb up the central aluminium staircase supported by long pilotis, a typical feature of the architect’s work. It resembles the stairs crowning the short side of his city hall building at Cassino, done in 1985, with its long metal plinths and walkways floating in mid-air as if in a Piranesian interior. Its usage here is to remove weight.

Massimiliano Fuksas wants to show us the white stones in the building’s inner courtyard, where green and white bamboo grow, and the black stones on the roof of the first level – the building doesn’t have proper floors – covered with water. When we go up to the second level, Fuksas starts to pace up and down the African wood walkways that smell of varnish. As he shows us this view of the building, he tells us point blank, “It was when I read Truffaut’s interview with Hitchcock, in the 1970s, that I understood. I am not interested in architecture that starts from architecture, but in architecture that starts from cinema. My architecture is a form of montage. I detest sequence shots in the Wenders style.”

As Fuksas makes this vivid statement, he points to the reflections on the water on the upper edge of the roofing – there are no real roofs in the Ferrari Product Development Centre at Maranello. The thin white margin of the roofing’s perimeter is devoured and blunted by the decorative glare of light and its wave like luminescence. The architect leans towards the surface of the water and energetically stirs the fifteen centimetre-wide puddle of transparent liquid. The waves above are mirrored in faster motion.

We turn back and ask him about the montage. He mentions Hitchcock’s film, Marnie, in which Tippi Hedren plays a thief with whom her employer (played by Sean Connery) falls in love. “At one point the scene is set in the city where Marnie’s mother lives. You see a street going downhill and at the bottom, in the distance, a ship. The whole thing is created in an interior and is a fake. But the ship in the distance informs us that we are in a sea port. Then the scene suddenly changes, and we are outside the front door of the house. This is montage. I don’t care what happens in the meantime. There is no need to tell us.”

Since the early 1980s, Fuksas’s architectural style has been evolving. It’s almost as if it has left the realm of architecture completely and moved into something else. It continues to reference, but the line is different now – it’s drier, more decisive, at times even eclectic. For him, architecture is like making a film. But what does it mean to make a film? In short, writing, shooting, and above all editing. Michael Ondaatje is the Canadian writer whose best-known book The English Patient (1993) won several Oscars when it was adapted for the big screen. During the film’s shooting, Ondaatje met Walter Murch, an extraordinary character. Murch edits films and images, but also the music and sounds that go with them. The writer was so struck by this figure that he decided to record a series of conversations.

These later became material for the book Cinema and the Art of Montage (Garzanti). To explain what Hitchcock practised, Murch distinguishes between Western cinema and art by using Eisenstein as an example, and Eastern cinema and art with Kurosawa. Murch found that “Eisenstein edits and constructs the scene, whereas Kurosawa removes and polishes. The scene is revealed in a film by Kurosawa, while in Eisenstein’s, and in the whole Western tradition, it is constructed.” Thus, it all depends on the camera.

The Russian director frames the whole scene showing the full choreography whereas in the Japanese movie Kurosawa frames a small detail, for example the corner of a table, and uses it to suggest the whole set. While we are on the second level with its black stone pond, we naively ask Fuksas if there is anything Japanese about the reflections and the black stones, and the wooden walkways that remind us so vividly of gardens in Kyoto. Looking somewhat puzzled, he turns and shows us the cuts made by the building into the landscape.

On the upper part of the Centre over the entrance, a long plane stretching forwards is suspended for sixteen metres in mid-air – a blade of glass and metal that sticks out over the entryway. At the back and on the side, however, it matches the lower part, where it rises up again as a unit in its own right resting on a sequence of almost invisible black metal plinths, to impress upon the body of the building the sense of suspension. Seen from above (from the level where it rises out of the blade of water), the building is a sort of black and thick (yet also thin in some places) frame defining the exterior.
The horizontal windows, the neighbouring houses, the lawns and the other architectures in the Ferrari complex all appear like horizontal photographs and are reminiscent of certain Emilia landscapes by Ghirri. The landscape is outside. It’s all there yet it is inside too, an image hanging in the void. In this way the building appears and disappears; it is there but you can’t see it all at once. It is true that Massimiliano Fuksas’s architecture is a montage; the detail is there, but it’s not important, in the manner of Eisenstein. And yet there is something Japanese about it too, in the Kurosawa style. The work as a whole cannot be seen, it can’t be taken in except in its detail. Yet there are no real particulars, or at least they do not let themselves be seen as such, as they do in the works of Carlo Scarpa.

With a touch of pride the architect says: “It’s a building that can’t be photographed.” Which is true, because there is no image of it in its entirety, no privileged angle. It is the editing of its parts that matters and photographing them will never give a comprehensive picture of the building. It’s a tough challenge for anyone with a camera, but one to be accepted, like that of understanding this architecture.

The surface effect predominates (inevitably reminding us of Gilles Deleuze, the most influential architectural philosopher of the 20th century, and of his interpretation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in his The Logic of Sense). Blades of light, reflections and dazzle, filters and mirrors: these are surfaces without depth. “Architecture does not remake the world, it exhibits it”, says Fuksas. This is a labyrinth but an open one, designed in the air. Even the architecture of the Centre itself is air, surrounded by transparent walls. The space inhabited by the people who work there is only a little more opaque than the rest, only a little more visually dense. This is perhaps architecture as a way of revealing light, with thin films as in the Vienna towers or the Îlot Candie-Saint-Bernard in Paris.

The man who designed the Ferrari Centre – certainly not at the drawing board staring at a blank sheet of paper – wanted to suggest an idea of architecture as a floating floor, a suspension. This is not the aerial lightness of Italo Calvino, the kind that removes weight from the world, but rather the lightness of something deeply thoughtful. It is architecture as gravity, of the kind that weighs down every built form and fastens it to the ground, but at the same time lifts it upwards and sideways into the emptiness. Thought not only as weightlessness, but as strength and resistance, heaviness even. Here, at Maranello, something has reached beyond its own destiny in space.