Day 2 of the talks section at the FAST festival brings together presentations by Francesca Torzo and Pablo Alarcón. The program opens with Francesca Torzo, who will share her reflections on architecture, place, and memory, followed by Pablo Alarcón, continuing the conversation with his own perspective and work.
Francesca Torzo’s talk framed architecture as an act of care grounded in time, memory, and a patient reading of place, rather than an exercise in form. She argued that design began with attentive observation of material and cultural conditions, and with listening to the specific qualities that “hinted” at what a place was. For her, architecture functioned as a practice of collecting, hunting, and discerning, assembling fragments of perception and lived contradictions into spatial narratives that preserved the site’s memory.
A central idea was that people could share spatial images even when their experiences differed. Our senses gathered impressions unpredictably, and our minds recombined them into fleeting images, a room, a bridge, a threshold, a belvedere, yet we could still communicate about them. This shared understanding was shaped by culture, literature, music, and history, references we might never physically visit, but could still “inhabit” mentally. What mattered, she suggested, was not the isolated object, but the relationships among things, the way sequences, distances, thresholds, light, and topography produced meaning.
She repeatedly returned to spatial relations and promenade. Architecture, in her view, was not primarily plan or graphic representation, it was choreography, a progression of moments between outside and inside, shelter and exposure, shadow and daylight. In her projects, she had studied how the public realm met the private realm, niches, pockets, courtyards, gateways, shortcuts, walls that folded, and she had translated those urban experiences into buildings. The goal had been continuity without imitation, extending the logics of an existing place rather than copying its historic forms.
In the Z33 extension in Hasselt, she described how her team had worked with the town’s “soft” ground and medieval traces, reading the beguinage, brick traditions, and the city’s rhythms. The new building became a long wall that welcomed without turning transparent, maintaining an urban edge while opening to the interior garden through a filigree of apertures. She emphasized “tuning” rather than measuring, finding a sense of belonging that avoided both loudness and invisibility. Ambiguity had been cultivated on purpose, walls could read as thick mass or as a system of pillars, openings could feel like folds in masonry, so that users had space to imagine, recall, and project their own memories.
Across other examples, a dance school and theatre sequences in China, a library pavilion as a tower and belvedere in a flood landscape, or large housing in an oak wood, she stressed the same method. She started from topography and from the culture of settlement, including water management, thresholds, porticoes, courtyards, and the way everyday life organized space. Architecture, she said, needed to be robust enough to accept future reinterpretations, allowing unknown rituals and meanings to emerge over time. She valued what she called the non-authorial wisdom of places shaped by many anonymous people, what had survived centuries was something people could trust, but it still had to be “sung again” today, not replicated.
Torzo also made a strong ethical point. She treated architecture as a practice of dignity and empathy, of making space for difference. She rejected nostalgia as sterile and warned against “expired” thoughts, the departure point had to be contemporary life. She explicitly distanced herself from form as the primary driver, form was not the goal, it followed from a deeper understanding of life, materials, and context.
On slowness, she offered a practical stance. Time in production, she noted, had become fast and likely would not change, but thinking did not have to accelerate in the same way. She advised young architects to train their discernment, to identify what was relevant, and to protect a reflective inner dialogue. This required self-respect, trust in one’s capacity to think, and the willingness to make room for other viewpoints through negotiation. For her, slow and fast were not a simple opposition, they coexisted, and the task was to keep precision and care within the speed of practice.
Pablo Allard framed his talk around a simple, uncomfortable premise, trust was earned through action, and learning came mostly from failure. He opened by admitting that his professional life had included “disasters,” using this as a teaching tool, the only real mistake was the one you learned nothing from. For him, building trust meant doing the right thing, not announcing good intentions, and accepting that you would sometimes fail.
He then zoomed out to cities, arguing that urban form mirrored society. The 20th-century functionalist city, organized by zoning and large infrastructures, produced systemic side effects, segregation, car dependence, pollution, and excessive land consumption. Meanwhile, urban growth had accelerated dramatically, revealing changing needs, expectations, and conflicts. Cities were “magnets” for opportunity, but also “time bombs” when access to education, jobs, safety, health, and culture was unequal, inequality became explosive. He illustrated this with stark global-south contrasts, informal settlements, slums, and extreme spatial inequality.
A core conceptual pair followed, scarcity of means could produce precision and relevance, while abundance of means could create a scarcity of meaning. In this context, he insisted that architecture was not just construction, it was “construction charged with meaning.”
Allard identified four forces shaping the next decades and the conditions for trust, climate action through cities, housing affordability and dignity, technological transformation toward shared urban life, and resilience in the face of shocks. He argued cities had been the lever for climate impact because they had concentrated energy use and emissions in a small land footprint. He advocated for integrated blue-green infrastructure, floodable parks, sponge-city thinking, circular systems, and long-term water strategies that had generated social benefits before the “final” infrastructure payoff.
On housing, he highlighted progressive, participatory models that had prioritized good location and robust structure, then allowed residents to complete and personalize, shifting value creation to communities. He linked technology to new sharing cultures, co-living, flexible permitting, and transparency, and to rethinking education through learning-by-doing environments.
Finally, resilience emerged as both technical and social. He recounted failures in conflict planning and disaster recovery to underline that city timelines had outlasted electoral cycles, advocacy had been part of the architect’s role, and recovery had needed to be holistic, combining infrastructure with community cohesion. His practical advice for young architects was direct, they should have started by listening, arrived with a blank sheet and two pencils, and built trust through time, presence, and shared work.
About Francesca Torzo (FRANCESCA TORZO ARCHITETTO)
Francesca Torzo (Padova 1975) studied in Barcelona, Mendrisio and Venezia. She graduated with honours in 2001. In 2008 she started her own office in Genova. Since 2017 she has been professor in Bergen and in Mendrisio. She has lectured at a number of international schools and cultural institutions. In 2020 she won the Moira Gemill Prize. The project Z33 house for contemporary art in Hasselt is awarded the international 2018 Piranesi Award, the Premio Italiano di Architettura in 2020 and is among the awarded five finalists of the Mies van der Rohe Award 2022.
About Pablo Allard
Pablo Allard is an architect with an MAUD and a Doctor of Design from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and degrees from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Since 2011 he has served as Dean of the Faculty of Architecture and Arts at Universidad del Desarrollo in Santiago and Concepción.
He bridges academia and practice: Robert F. Kennedy Visiting Professor at Harvard GSD (2018–2019) and visiting professor at Tec de Monterrey, the University of Arizona, and the Pontifical Catholic Universities of Quito and Chile. He is founding partner of Allard & Partners (architecture, urban design, territorial intelligence) and co-founder of Nueva Vía Consultores, focused on infrastructure and mobility.
Allard is also a co-founder of ELEMENTAL, alongside Alejandro Aravena, internationally recognized for its pioneering work in social housing and post-disaster reconstruction. In 2010 he served as National Urban Reconstruction Coordinator, leading Chile’s recovery efforts after the earthquake and tsunami. He currently serves on several civic and environmental boards such as Reforestemos and Junto al Barrio and contributes to national policies on urban development and sustainable mobility.
Photo credit: @the_phope – Csaba Szekely, Mereuță Xenia, Anton Daria
