The success enjoyed by Massimiliano Fuksas is due largely to his anticonformist character. At the age of 60, the Italian architect remains a polemic and controversial figure. Rejecting all conventional wisdom, he inspires his supporters who believe, like him, in the humanist aims of the act of building. Dozens of buildings have marked the 37 years of a career imbued with this philosophy. Fuksas develops his architecture through drawings, paintings, experimental models, reflections about the very essence of space. His work is difficult to classify since he enjoys changing the space throughout his buildings, outside and inside. This results in architecture that is always charged with tension, as if at breaking point.

Exploratory architecture arouses emotional reactions, and as it is the expression of imagination, it is often surprising. From his very early projects, like the sports centre at Anagni in Italy, the materials, however conventional they may be, are nevertheless treated in a most unconventional manner: tuff used without mortar in the cemetery of Orvieto, zinc varnished black for the media library in Rézé, or white in the Collčge Saint-Exupéry in Noisy-le-Grand. This is also the case of the Corten steel in the Musée des Graffito ŕ Niaux in the Pyrenees, or the structure anchored in a rock wall for the gymnasium in Paliano.

The new Conference Centre in Rome (see photo) takes the shape of a large, translucent bowl, 30 metres high. It could answer the question: “How do you build a cloud?” The shape, made of steel and Teflon and covering 3500 m˛ floating over a complex multi-purpose space of 15,000 m˛ demonstrates that.

Two of his most recent projects, which have won international competitions, define his work on the city and on transparency. A symbolic building, the new Piedmont Region Building, in Turin, (see photo) dialogues with a broad context, particularly with the natural elements surrounding it. "It is a space that not only represents the region, but is also transparent, permeable, a filter through which the building can be open to the city, and the city enters the building."