Massimo Buccilli

Massimo Buccilli has a degree in marketing from N.O.V.A. College of Alexandria, Virginia, USA and a translation degree in English and Spanish from the University in Trieste. He has been employed in cross-border cooperation and export matters in international companies and organisations. He has been with VELUX since 1991, and since 1997 he has held the position as General Manager of VELUX in Italy.

Question. What is your opinion, or your overall impression about the quality of the projects submitted in this edition?
Answer. The quality in average is quite good I think. Especially if we refer to the object of the competition I think there have been some serious attempts to produce something interesting, innovative and in full observance of the award rules.

Q. The award guidelines included themes such as natural and artificial light, urban context, and so on. In general terms, have the students chosen to deal with these themes?
A. Some have done it more precisely, some others not as precisely. I think that apart from the fact that they have given attention to these themes, what I saw emerging is a lot of research for new solutions. Even though I think that in the end what we ended up rewarding were those projects that used traditional architecture in an innovative way in order to use light.

Q. And in this sense, to what extent have the proposals worked on the effects of light on materials, on texture?
A. There have been some very interesting effects in my opinion. In some cases, of course, you question whether they can be realised, but I think there have been many of these new elements in terms of reflecting light in different ways, using different types of materials in unconventional situations.

Q. The award rules do not specify anything about the possibility of realising the projects.
A. There is an attention to urban living, so anything that was outside the urban living concept was a bit outside the scope. Yes, there was no specification as to whether these things should be implemented in practice, but when you think of urban living, you really think of something practical, so it is implicit in a way that it should be realistic, even though, of course, an innovative idea might have to be tested. But once again, I think there is enough competence in the jury also to understand in what cases this could result in a realistic project or in what cases it seemed to be too imaginary.

Q. Finally, what made the winning proposals winners?
A. The winning proposals had in common that they were real architecture work, you could see that there was not only an idea, but also some pure architectural forms, shapes, the use of light and so on, so they had in common that they were very strong in architectural terms. In my opinion another feature was that they all used light in an innovative way but without using innovative elements, meaning that they used inclination of light, they used architecture to transform light, to deviate light, while still using traditional elements. Another important feature that these three projects have in common is that you could see the original idea, and you could see also how this idea turned into a project.

Q. For the next VELUX Award in 2008, maybe there will be even more proposals, will you follow the same selection process?
A. In my opinion yes. Even though it has been very difficult because it has required a lot of concentration, I think that the only way to give a fair chance to everybody is to go through this process we have followed, very thorough, very time-consuming, but in my opinion that is the only way we can really do it. I think the students who have done this great effort deserve as much attention as possible and we should come with that approach in order to give each project a fair chance.