Gianluca Peluffo: The Architect Who Still Believes in Architecture

In the 20th installment of the 'Architetti d’Italia' series, critic Luigi Prestinenza Puglisi profiles Gianluca Peluffo, a Genoese architect whose career was long intertwined with Alfonso Femia under the studio 5+1 AA until their split in mid-2017. Peluffo advocates for a 'heretical' architectural language that embraces an infinite repertoire of images, rejecting the soft aestheticism prevalent in Italian architecture. He proposes eight keywords—heresy, myth, body/matter, intersubjectivity, genealogy, generosity, time, contemporaneity—as a framework to reclaim history not as a paralyzing model but as a generative, mythological dimension. His approach contrasts sharply with the tech-driven, performance-oriented vision of Carlo Ratti, as debated in a 2017 face-off moderated by Puglisi. Peluffo's work, exemplified by the Docks in Marseille (2009–15), seeks to restore poetry and collective meaning to architecture, though Puglisi questions whether this ultimately serves the 'magician' architect more than the public.