Teaching design at the LSA — Giulia Furlan

We spoke to the Design Tutors delivering our programme at the LSA and asked about their design methodology and ethos as professional designers and architects. Giulia Furlan is a Second Year Design Tutor at the LSA and co-founder of architecture studio Furlan Beeli et al. Here’s what she had to say.

Giulia (right) and fellow co-founder of Furlan Beeli et al., Mario Beeli (left). (Credit: Barbara Hartmann Fotografie, München.)

As architects, we are committed to explore both the physical and ideational potential of architecture. As a practice, we aim to make architecture with dimensions that reach beyond the limitations of the measurable. An architecture that belongs to the domain of imagination but which anyone is able to decode into a personal image that is exciting and meaningful. We seek to make architecture that can trigger an emotional sizing which goes beyond facts to carve deeper into the lives of those experiencing it fostering their ability to shape the world through personal feelings and thoughts. Our understanding of space, as a site of physical confrontation imbued with experiences and fantasies, has its roots in the fascination for enigmatic phenomena.

Project 1 — New Exit for the Medicee Chapels

Florence, 2018, competition entry

The task of the competition was to propose a roof and a staircase that would lead from the bookshop of the museum underground to the street level. Our project is a system composed of white marble blocks purely in compression and black painted steel pieces purely in tension to form a balanced mechanism emerging from the ground.

Project 1 — Rwanda Chapel

Rukomo, 2019, competition entry

The platform and its 4 sloped side-walls are all made of timber pillars and beams covered with thick thatch. The surface of the thatched layer is cut straight as a dense carpet that bends on the sloped sides into a sculptural morphology. The space it defines has the character of an abstract dry garden. A few steps lead through a side opening into the space that the 4 slopes protect. Here one exits the landscape and enter a different dimension. The natural horizon is no longer a reference, there are glimpses on it through the corner openings, but the surface of the platform hovers at a different height. The big space that opens towards the sky is the atrium of the church.