Past Present Future: video interview with Mario Cucinella

“After university I immediately started working with Renzo Piano.
I remained in his office for five years. After that I wanted to start my practice. You do that because you don’t know how much difficult is. The work of Renzo seemed to be very easy. I thought: ‘everything goes so fast here; I want to start alone’. But it was very complicated. I always say that I was in a very fast train, and then I jumped out the train end everything was so slow.”

“The modernists tried to cut the bridge with our past. You cannot cut your past. In the last 25 years, architects lost this idea completely, looking for this eccentric architecture and to be very provocative, which is sometimes ok. But it is something very solid, people live in it, we have to be very careful.”

“There is only one direction. And this direction is about sustainability. It’s about how we can change the relationship between man, buildings and nature. There is no choice.” “Past, Present, Future: About being an architect yesterday, today and beyond” is a series of video interviews conducted by Itinerant Office. Eleven internationally renowned architects have been asked to talk about their own past, present and future, exploring the figure of the architect and his or her role in contemporary society.