This debate is both very good and very bad. It’s very positive because it focuses the attention of the media and people on architecture. People have become aware that architecture is alive and it designs them as they are. This is the good part of the debate. On the other hand the negative aspect is that quite often the emphasis stops simply on the person and not on the architecture. Let’s put it this way: you may love a film with a great movie star but you may not want to know the details about the love life of the film star.

It’s not up to me to say. All I know is that some people think I am.

No, I am not an archistar. Other people do think I am, but personally I do not. I do not care about being in the limelight.

Well, the best example is Zaha Hadid who is both a good and an important architect, but always under the limelight, always in evidence.

Surely Frank O. Gehry.

Frank O. Gehry and Zaha Hadid are probably the two most celebrated architects worldwide. They want to be popular and they make themselves very accessible to the press and to the media.

I think it’s very interesting to take into consideraton the fact that the people who find it offensive belong to another time, another era and period.

Now we are in the era of global culture, in the age of internet. The architects Gregotti, Portoghesi and Botta instead, are of the age of local culture, a different age as opposed to the modern era.

The world has moved forward. I think these three architects are very clever and their work is very good, but today architecture raises new and different questions about the global conditions. Their approach is still traditional.

That is a big big question – Bernard Tschumi laughs – Architecture is always about space, movement and events. Architecture does not exist without the relationship with an event that happens in it. It is not a sculpture, so it’s when you move inside the architecture and when you have a dynamic relation with architecture that you can understand the quality and importance of it.

When you move through a space you completely change the static feeling of that space. Architecture is not like a painting. It’s really an active relation between the visitor and the space. For instance when I enter a room, the movement of my body in that room changes the relationship with it. The room is different if there is nobody, if there is one person or if there are 100 people. So the relationship between the people in the room and the room itself, is very important in the reading of architecture. The violence I mean is a change of the space.

I always think projects start with an idea, with the concept, not with a form. I will give you an example. When we did the museum, the Acropolis Museum in Athens, inaugurated 21st June 2008, work started in 2003 – we started from this important idea: the project as a story, to see the building as a story with a narrative, so that people would walk along the museum like they would be reading a book or watching a film. A structure that can let you read the story of Ancient Greece: we realized glass ceilings and glass floors to give people the opportunity to see both above and below giving the impression of walking in space - it is a building completely in glass that allows the visitors to see the excavations below; the upper part, that hosts the Parthenon gallery, is traslated of 23°, oriented towards the Acropolis - A work of architecture must tell a story: in the case of a museum it’s almost always a story.

Innovation is always about, how could I say, establishing different relations. Let me give you again the example with the museum: we decided to put the museum on top of the archeological ruins instead of next to them so the building is on columns, lifted on columns above the archeological ruins – the Museums is suspended above the archaelogical excavations and is held by 100 cement pillars. Nobody has ever done this before. In this way I showed that we must accept that the new and the old can be engaged in a dialogue, in a conversation. Innovation means to dare, so when we presented the Museum, there were a lot of polemics.

I told them two things. That we must accept that the new and the old have to live together and I also told them that the space that would result from this superposition would be incredibly beautiful and when it was built they understood and they liked it. I’ll give you the example of a project that we studied in China Factory 698: we proposed a whole city on stilts, on columns, above an old neighborhood. There was an old area with small houses and with, you know, art galleries and schools and we preserved all of this and I built 20 meters above. We built a new city above but we kept the old part below. So that the new and the old cohabit.

I think that function is not necessarily always related to form. Function can exist in many different forms and form itself can have many different functions.

Say you have a house. A house does not to have a door a window and a roof. A house can be double. A house can have the shape of a tree, a house can look like an umbrella or look like a science fiction machine. All of these could be houses. The form can be different but it has the same function.

I don’t put it in the first place. I think you know this expression one does not do good literature with good intentions. Let’s think about cinema: there are very important films where all the characters are bad but the film is very good. I will give you an example. Think of the very good Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini: you can see that the actors are not always beautiful but the film is a very good film. The same applies to architecture: in a beautiful architecture ugly things and very beautiful things coexist at the same time.

Think about objects of designers, like chairs. At the end of Thirties the designer Giuseppe Terragni, or more recently in the Seventies Paolo Deganello, or also the Dutch Gerrit Thomas Rietveld designed very beautiful chairs but they were not functional. So you can design functional objects that are very bad aesthetically, or very beautiful chairs that are very uncomfortable.

Difficult question. But I will say I would prefer one which is beautiful and comfortable.

I do not know what is happening now with the San Benedetto stadium. I have not been contacted by the city for a long time. I believe there are political issues, but I do not really know anything.

I am not informed about that.

I do not agree: there are many examples of very important buildings in small towns. The most famous example is the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao by Frank O. Gehry. Before that project who knew Bilbao? A few people. Important projects give visibility to cities.

I do not know him. But it is not true. Maybe it could have been true years ago, when I was keen on studying and understanding. Today it is different. During these last twenty years I have built a lot.