Adam Caruso; Peter St John
with
Philip Heckhausen
The facade is a window to the soul of architecture. What a clear and yet intriguing statement! Behind it is proven experience, judgement and skill. In all of their work, Adam Caruso and Peter St John discuss the emotional potential and physical qualities of construction. The practice understands and orchestrates materials, twinning the research worlds of teaching and proof by inventive building. Place and the given brief nurture their imaginations, anchoring their buildings sensually. Memory and familiarity are transformed into contemporary beauty and elegance. They say of their practice of approximately twenty-five people, that they aim to have a wide range of work at a variety of scales and want to resist the trend of increased size and specialisation that dominates contemporary architecture. Within the spirit of the theme of FREESPACE, Caruso St John focus on the facade, revealing its historical richness and potential for social generosity, maintaining that it has been missing from architectural discourse for too long. By means of their own work and of selected facades from dierent places and from different time periods which have influenced them, the visitor to the Biennale Architettura may delve, “more deeply into the construction of these facades and into the mysterious relationship between urban image and material reality”.