Custom made: Sense and method in the design of architecture, city and landscape

When something is custom made, it is designed according to the needs and imaginary of the customer. Even if in the design disciplines, the customer is a multiple concept and not necessarily a material one. The society, the place, the lifestyle, the city, the landscape, the history, the culture, the happiness… are the customer. In other words, the context (physical / social / economic / cultural) is the real customer of the projects that change the solid space where we live, move, and relate. But thinking about the possibility of a custom made project means referring to an idea of the design disciplines that is very far from that of the primacy of architecture. Far from conceiving authorship as a brand. The idea of custom made is quite distant from any absolute conception of our work such as the typology, the model, the functional zones, the best practices, ..., and from any other temptation to cliché architecture. Each project invention has its roots in the Latin word invenio which means to find. Each context has its own methabolism or, in other words, it hides within itself its own program of change. Our task is to identify (as Jorgos Simeoforidis said we are detectives of the project) and reveal it in a physical form. From a theoretical point of view, the custom made design shifts the construction of the project idea from the sign to the sense. So, what the sense of architecture (as the complex of the design disciplines) can be in the age of the ecological emergency and in the revolution of sharing information technologies? In an age that seems to consider with least with absolute priority the development of the Net and of the connecting devices? If today – and in the future more and more – the focus of cities development is no longer the growth but the resilience and environmental quality? When not the new constructions, but the effciency and re-signifcation of existing ones become the central issue of building sector?