Who he is
Giacomo Faro is 34. He studied literature in Bologna, then began writing to survive and travelling to live. He is not an architect — he is a writer obsessed with spaces. He read Ruskin on trains, Zevi on planes, Jencks beside unknown rivers. He has slept in Osaka hostels, São Paulo student houses, Helsinki Airbnbs overlooking buildings by Aalto.
This, he says, is his advantage: he enters a building the way a reader enters a novel. Without already knowing the ending. Without the filters of someone who has studied for a long time what they should see. And often finds things that those who already knew what to look for missed.
He keeps 23 travel notebooks. One is dedicated entirely to Louis Kahn. He has visited the same square in Barcelona seventeen times in ten years. He still hasn't gotten tired of it.
How he writes
His articles never start with the building's history. They start with a moment: an hour, a light, a physical sensation. Then comes the question — the one the trip exists to answer. And then the route: the places in the right order, the comparison between stops, the thing you only understand by having made the whole journey.
He doesn't write tourist guides. He never says "unmissable". He tells you what he's looking at, why he's looking at it, and what changes in the way you see after having looked at it. His ideal reader is someone who has already studied the architect — and now finally wants to meet them.
His positions
Giacomo Faro has firm opinions about how architectural tourism is done. He doesn't hold back.
«It's worth it — but not for what you think. Not for the Nativity façade. For the interior columns: understanding how Gaudí solved the load problem is the only thing that matters.»
«The problem isn't the number of people. The problem is that almost no one knows what they're looking at. And it's not their fault — it's the fault of whoever never taught them.»
«The eighteenth-century Grand Tour wasn't a day trip. It was a curriculum. Young aristocrats came back changed because they had seen buildings no book could explain. This stuff still works.»
«It's the city that changes the most if you go back. Every three years it's a different place. It's the only metropolis in the world where architecture is always in dialogue with its own obsolescence.»
Upcoming itineraries
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In prep.
Rome: three buildings to understand how the Romans thought about space
Itinerary · Italy · 12 min -
In prep.
Gaudí's Barcelona — reading a city through an obsession
City portrait · Europe · 15 min -
In prep.
Zenithal light: 5 buildings from Aalto to Kahn
Thematic itinerary · Europe + USA · 14 min -
In prep.
Tokyo: where Modernism meets the ephemeral
City portrait · Asia · 13 min
Areas of interest
- → Multi-country thematic itineraries
- → Portraits of European cities
- → Contemporary Japanese architecture
- → The ground floor and the city
- → Architecture as sensory experience
- → Light and space in museums
- → Travel as a formative path