Henri Edouard Ciriani was born in Peru in 1936 and received his training in architecture in Lima. After graduating at a very early age, he worked with the Instituto Nacional de la Vivienda, a goverment town planning organisation, executing several large-size projects. In the early sixties at Ventanilla, Matute and San Felipe, the democratic Peruvian government created a real laboratory for territorial experimentation, based on themes and methods belonging to the modern movement's building conceptions. In these early executions Ciriani already began concentrating on the elaboration of complexity from simple architectural elements, often connected with traditional components of the home, taken apart and put back together in a contemporary organism. From then on, roads, public space, the typological complexity and social quality of architecture remain a system the author would never give up, refining his building research towards an increasingly intentional spatial quality of organisms, to be consciously filtered into a rich plasticity of the building. After an extended briefing tour through Europe in the mid-sixties, he moved to Paris, worked with the Gornis studio, then was associated with the architect Borja Huidobro and the landscape designer Michel Corajoud until the mid-seventies. Those were the days of the great competitions for the 'villes nouvelles', where Ciriani worked in association with the A.U.A. and, occasionally, with Ricardo Bofill. The designs for Dunkirk, l'Isle d'Abeau and Evry drafted between 1971 and 1975 were an essential passage for his territorial research, maturing an ever-closer connection between urban form and architectural form. Ciriani opened hisown studio in 1975, working on public housing programmes, completing a theoretic reflection on the intermediary scale between plan and project that he would call the 'little utopia of the urban "piece, the fragment having a