I am among those who believe that form is never a mere result — nor a question of superficial appearance — but a deliberate synthesis of the many forces at play in artistic production. Form embodies the author’s educated subjectivity, their position within a discipline and its tradition, and their capacity to order a hierarchy of problems ranging from the apparently particular to those that open toward broader cultural, social, and political dimensions. Form is a big, big issue. Form is not innocent: it bears witness to the author’s inner battles and reflects the manifold contexts that have conditioned the emergence of the work.
           Mazzocchioo #11 brings together a remarkable and complementary group of individuals who, over more than twenty years of shared practice and reflection, have cultivated a sustained passion for — and commitment to — the form of things.
           Conceptually, form is at once a reason and a result. San Rocco was founded on the shared belief that architecture is primarily a formal problem. As Matteo noted, “by addressing form and space, you address all the other issues: political, social and so on; so we cannot avoid the topic of form through which all these other values converge and are made into a manifest.” In deciding its character, San Rocco, as a commentary on its own editorial nature, began by defining its form through pragmatic, concrete decisions: a five-year plan, twenty issues, a declared ending, announced topics, treated as a folder, a catalogue of projects, with a specific theme for each issue; and NO text on the cover. Its spirit was also, in a way, a formal statement: as Kersten remarked, “San Rocco was like this kind of alternative music fanzine: zero compromises, you hate everybody, sometimes you love everybody.
        Bas returns to the profound idea of documentary photography, a notion that is gaining renewed relevance today. “Fifteen or ten years ago, I would never have called my work documentary. But now, in an age where images circulate online, are not fixed, and are subject to minor alterations — whatever the algorithms do — the idea of the document is becoming more important again. The document, as a print or as an archival object, can exist online, but it should definitely exist offline. So, in a way, this is a long introduction to the work I’m doing now.” The uniqueness of the object is central. It requires deliberate decisions regarding its physical form: the type of paper, dimensions, framing, lighting, and so on. This process may have led Bas to his profound meditations on space through the pavilions he created, sometimes in collaboration with OFFICE: images of reality reintroduced into the world of things as site-specific installations. In some cases, as with Wilmarsdonk, the photographs documenting the past serve as witnesses to the actual aging of the old, depicted tower, merging image and reality in a temporal continuum.
          Kersten belongs “to a generation of architects who believe that if architecture has the desire to survive, than it needs to be obsessively busy with itself”. The laboratory he led at EPFL was named FORM. The acronym itself functioned as a manifesto at a time when prevailing cultural fashions reduced architecture to the mere outcome of other concerns — social, political, journalistic, and so on. FORM, obsessively and systematically, sought to restore architecture from this marginal position, academically instrumentalizing its key elements, themes, and protagonists: room, grid, material, perimeter, light, structure, geometry; scale and typology, the big box, the evenly covered field; history, complexity and contradiction, zero-degree architecture; Bramante, Koolhaas, Palladio and Scamozzi, Mies and McKim, Mead & White, Rossi, Ruscha, LeWitt, Ungers, Stirling, Krier, Hockney, Siza and Venturi and their mothers, Hans Hollein, Bas Princen, and many others.
         Later, his academic activity stands under the name Office without Office — a reverse, tongue-in-cheek reference to OMA and AMO — reflecting the ideal that practice, academia, and research should be unified. Illustrating this fundamental belief, OFFICE’s work is highly critical and theoretically charged; it is not composed of episodic responses to successive commissions. Their architecture is describable, coherent, and finds character within itself: “An architecture made as a sequence of spaces, is one that concentrates on the threshold, both internally and between the inside and outside. It is an architecture that is increasingly disconnected from its real content, and that – perhaps in an old tradition – concentrates on the perimeter. One could say it is an architecture without content, provocatively perhaps, but with the aim of emphasizing that its primary function lies not in the manipulation of what it contains, but rather in the simple mediation between what happens inside and outside.”