I've been working as an architect since about thirty years. My first building was done in 1950 or'52 and my main interest has always been to get things built. I think that architecture exists as architecture only when it's built and it's built only once, is built in a time and a place and is a witness that the architects give in a time and in a place. In the 50's my attempt was to rely to some range of general ideas which were not related to any kind of style, or movement, but to some kind of general principles related to the place, to the site, to the geographical situation, orientation, relation to any urban fabric or a landscape or an agricultural situation. And trying to find out some kind of symbolic pieces to rebuild in the building a sort of microcosm. The first buildings I did are showing clearly this kind of attempt. They are playing around the same idea, the idea of gravity and the idea of the cave. Those three buildings have in common those big brick columns which are sort of earth piled up to hold down the roof.

The Migotto House near Udine, which is a small house built up in an existing garden with old trees, the idea was to have this wall around the site which was making a boundary, so that the site would become like a cave. And in this cave, those columns were coming up to the first floor, and on top of this heavy sort of cave dug in the ground, there was a continuous frame which is the first floor, and the house is moving from this kind of blow-out level to this kind of air level, trying to represent the earth-and the sky as symbolic elements.