The opportunity to establish his own office came with a commission to design a house for a friend, and another for the farmhouse. But it was Belgium’s well-run competition system that gave an outsider the chance to make public buildings. His first success was a project to redesign the entrance hall of the Flemish parliament. Farris’s proposal challenged assumptions inherent in the brief, setting the pattern for subsequent projects. The requirement to accommodate a space-hungry mix of activities threatened to compromise appreciation of the historic interior, so Farris proposed a lightweight two-story pavilion at one end of the room, within which multifunctional spaces support the heterogeneous program. Its formal and material language derives from the architecture of the hall, drawing attention to its surroundings as well as itself.

Reconciling a respect for context with the desire to give an intervention its own character was also a central preoccupation in the extension of a public library in Bruges. While the low-rise addition is formally subordinate, its rusty steel cladding contrasts with the white plaster of the historic building, introducing a deliberate “tension” between the two. This feeling for the particularities of place has deep roots. “It is my cultural baggage,” Farris explains. “Every Italian architect is born in a place with a lot of history, where you have to be careful of the consequences in adding the new to the old.” But his work is refined by “the critical ability that you gain by working outside the culture in which you were born.”

Developing an international perspective was one of Farris’s aims in establishing his practice. The studio is beginning to work overseas and is pushing into new professional territories, as in a project for a radio station that encompasses the design of its furniture and graphic identity. Looking more broadly, Farris says, “We want to make buildings that can improve the quality of the city, and of life.”

Studio Farris