Fundamental Acts

Fundamental Acts

Architecture can be understood through a set of permanent principles that structure the way we design and think.
Today we have the possibility to reconsider radically how these fundamental acts can operate in response to contemporary conditions, how they can absorb new questions and adapt to the necessities of our time.

These fundamental acts constitute the basic grammar of architecture: a set of archetypal elements that transcend scale and context, time and space, operating from objects to buildings, from furniture to landscapes, while remaining recognisable as simple spatial gestures.

The lecture explores the possibility of an architecture reduced to its essential matters and proposes revisiting, with fresh eyes, the elementary components through which architecture organises relationships between bodies, collectivities, and climate.

In a complex world, fundamental acts frame contemporary forms of inhabitation. In the midst of ecological crisis, where every action leaves a significant footprint, they allow architecture to collect what already exists and rearrange it through the project. In a hostile political climate, where culture is often treated as a superfluous luxury, these acts can condense the necessary vitality for architecture to become the vessel of a shared common ground.

Through projects developed within the practice Piovenefabi, together with pedagogical reflections emerging from current and past teaching experiences, the lecture searches for what remains constant in architecture and still necessary today: its fundamental acts.

Ambra Fabi Bio
Ambra Fabi is an Italian architect, educator, and co-founder of the architecture office Piovenefabi, established with Giovanni Piovene and based in Milan and Brussels. The practice explores architecture as an evocative medium capable of shaping both personal and collective experiences across multiple scales—from furniture and objects to buildings and urban interventions.
The work is characterised by a series of experimental pavilions conceived as minimal architectural acts that activate public space and collective engagement. Piovenefabi is currently building a hotel in Brussels and has recently completed a residential tower with cultural facilities in Paris. The studio’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Lisbon Architecture Triennale, the Chicago Architecture Biennial, the Rotterdam Biennale, the Venice Biennale, the Horst Festival, and the Concéntrico Festival, Maniera Gallery, Campo, and has been widely published in architectural magazines such as Casabella, Abitare, Domus, A+, Accattone, San Rocco, and About. The project 5 Pavilions for 5 Parks has won the Visit Brussels Awards 2018, and has been shortlisted for the T-Young, Medaglia d’oro dell’Architettura 2018 and the Brussels Architecture Prize 2021.
Fabi has been teaching in a wide European context, from Academia di Architettura Mendrisio, to ULB Brussels, UCLouvain Brussels, KU Leuven, and IED Cagliari. She has been invited as a guest professor at EPFL Lausanne in the fall semester of 2023 and 2024 and she is currently a permanent professor at the École d’Architecture de la Ville et des Territoires de Paris-Est, where she has been leading architecture studios at both bachelor’s and master’s levels and where she is currently coordinating the full introductory year.