The text has been published as introduction on the book AEDS | Ammar Eloueini – CoReFab, ORO Editions, 2005.

There are two reasons why I appreciate the work of Ammar Eloueini. The first is that his concept of architecture begins with the body. The second is that Ammar is one of the few architects I know who raises the issue of the ecology of the digital.

Of course, there is nothing new about beginning with the body. In fact, there are many, actually there are legions of followers of Loos, Le Corbusier or Wright who make architecture as a tailor would make a suit, stitching space together based on the needs of the user. However, as Koolhaas has noted, these architects must often content themselves with stitching together a straight jacket, rather than a comfortable suit. When it comes time to build, architecture tends almost inevitably to transform itself into a series of unsupportable spatial restrictions: circulation, views, touch, sound, the olfactory and perhaps even taste. It is difficult to free oneself from these restrictions using traditional instruments or, as it would appear that Koolhaas is suggesting, by using the almost nothingness of Mies. Ammar understands instead that in order to avoid the straight jacket we must do more than simply move towards transparency and evanescence, because a process of removal would only lead us to the negation of architectural space: which we can find, for example, in the work of the radical Italian groups Archizoom and Superstudio. It is also necessary to act positively and technologically to transform the inanimate into something animate, breathing life into it, forcing it to interact. Architecture is thus transformed into an element of mediation between the needs of the body and those of the surrounding environment. This will allow us to overcome the very dichotomy which Ammar hypothesised five years ago in his project for the Sarajevo Concert Hall, with its two different membranes: the first is internal and interacts with the public and the sounds of the concert hall and the second, external, captures urban vibrations and the breath of the city.

Even though he entrusts himself to the world of the electronic and of artificial intelligence, Ammar manages, however, to avoid the two pitfalls into which other electronic designers often fall. The first is a cyber-Platonism that leads to artificial, cold and cerebral spaces where man is only a collection of bits who must relate to the bits of the sensors that control the architectural envelope. The second trap is that of hyper-organicism, which leads to monstrous and gigantic cauliflower where the designer plays with vegetal and animal geometry, using Boolean algebra and fractals for the mere gusto of creating compositions that are deviously and uselessly complex. What helps Ammar to avoid these two errors are his Oriental and Mediterranean genes which are well aware of the pleasures of matter, and certainly not willing to give them up. Flows, curves, light and transparency are the prerogatives of an architecture within which lightness is not a declination of anorexia, but of sensuality, through which we capture the ecology of the digital which I mentioned at the beginning of this essay. In all honestly we must admit that we do not yet truly know how to deal with the digital world. We are obsessed with it and overcome by it. We only look at its aspects of speed, efficiency and productivity. We pathologically suffer from it, such that doctors are now identifying new symptoms such as stress caused by email or by the lack of an Internet connection. Ammar’s greatest talent is that of demonstrating how it is possible, instead, to enter into contact with the digital in a soft way, enjoying material immateriality or, if we wish, immaterial materiality. Wearing it like a suit, and not a pair of work overalls. It is no accident that one person who has become aware of this uncommon ability is actually a tailor who, like Ammar, is extraordinarily talented.