Doriana and Massimiliano Fuksas make up the husband-and-wife team behind the Rome-based architecture firm Fuksas, which generates some of the world's most technically and aesthetically daring structures

MARRIED TO THE JOB | One of eight structures the Fuksas firm designed for the New Milan Trade Fair, a complex of convention and exhibition spaces. Marizio Marcato

IN 2011, Italian architect Massimiliano Fuksas penned an article for the Rome-based weekly l'Espresso. In "Starchitect? No Thanks," the now 70-year-old Fuksas took on the culture of celebrity that has sprung up around big-name designers and their ever-more-spectacular buildings. "Wouldn't it be better," he asked, "just to make good architecture?"

For nearly 45 years, Fuksas has been operating on the premise that it would. Avoiding the signature gestures and pet theories of some of his more household-name contemporaries, Fuksas has managed to make work—like his futuristic, bubble-bound Fiera Milano exhibition center and his glitzy Fifth Avenue store for Armani in Manhattan—that's both technically daring and visually extravagant without lapsing into the kind of easy icon-making that can be reduced to a metaphor or a napkin sketch.

Doriana and Massimiliano Fuksas Ramon Prat

A key element of his success is that for much of his career, he hasn't been doing the work alone: In a field that often relegates women to the background, the Fuksas firm is a shared enterprise, run in tandem with Doriana Fuksas, his wife since 1981. "Maybe we're complementary," says Doriana (née Mandrelli). "We love the same things, the same feelings and moods—just in a different way. I'm much more pop; he's more classic." The creative interplay between the two is something of a mystery even to them, but whatever the particular steps in their pas de deux, they've carved out a niche in the architecture world, expanding their practice vertically—with ever larger and more ambitious projects—as well as horizontally, into products and furniture that possess the same quirky sensibility as their buildings.

To accommodate its 100-odd staff, the duo's operation occupies four floors of a Renaissance palazzo in Rome not far from the Piazza Navona. "I like to think of my office as being like the studio of an artisan or a craftsman," says Massimiliano. "You can do contemporary work even when you're in a historic context." As defiantly unnostalgic as the couple's work can be, the Fuksases evidently feel grounded in the older space. They restored its lime putty walls to reveal centuries of layered plaster and paint. Set against some very non-Renaissance furniture—much of it designed by the couple, like the Haworth Castelli "Mumbai" table and the "Ma–zik" chair for Saporiti—the Fuksases' studio environment announces their breezy comfort with ultramodern design, a style that sees nothing wrong with putting industrial fluorescent lighting under an ancient wooden ceiling with delicately painted coffers.

The Tbilisi Public Service Hall Archivio Fuksas

The Fuksases are likewise a mix. Doriana was trained not as an architect but as an art historian, and she met her future husband when she enrolled in a design course he was teaching at Sapienza Università di Roma. Even then, and for several years after they married, she didn't go into art or design, working instead as a journalist before taking a more active role in the studio in the mid-1980s.

Massimiliano's architectural lineage marks him as a purebred Italian modernist, a former pupil of theorist and designer Bruno Zevi, the grand old man of Italian 20th-century architecture. Zevi championed uncompromising modernism spiked with a deep sense of social commitment, and Massimiliano took his ideas to heart—along with some of Zevi's politics, becoming deeply involved in the European student movement of the late '60s. Massimiliano's family lineage, meanwhile, is very much a hodgepodge: His Jewish Lithuanian father met his Italian-born mother in the 1940s. The family name, he claims, means "unexpected" (though no Lithuanian dictionary will confirm that).

Shenzhen Bao'an International Airport Terminal 3Archivio Fuksas

Unexpected or not, the Fuksases' blended backgrounds have informed not just the look of their projects but the places where they're looking to build them. "I've always been a citizen of Europe and of the world," Massimiliano says. "Globalization is really important to me and always has been." Among their most recent projects is China's Shenzhen Bao'an International Airport Terminal 3. Completed in November 2013, the building is configured as the crossing of two tubular sleeves—or two sleeves-within-sleeves—their layered, latticed membranes allowing natural daylight to filter through in beguiling patterns (and cutting down on the need for electric lighting). Unusually for a project of this size, Massimiliano says, "everything is Fuksas"—the firm designed both the envelope and the interior. In this instance, the labor was shared equally by husband and wife, with Doriana and Massimiliano both tackling the design of the terminal's overall structure and its furniture and fixtures.

The restored Renaissance offices of studio FuksasMoreno Maggi

The studio is also wrapping up work on a building in Tbilisi, Georgia, the centerpiece of a new urban park at the heart of the city. The as-yet-unnamed musical theater and exhibition hall in Rhike Park is described by its creators as "a periscope to the city." Situated near a bend in the Mtkvari River, its horseshoe plan addresses the cityscape both upstream and down—including a nod toward another Fuksas building in Tbilisi, the Public Service Hall, opened in 2012. The Fuksases have found building in developing countries to be a liberating experience—free of the bureaucratic hang-ups that have daunted them closer to home. "In Georgia, it's like in China," says Doriana. "You have an idea and they do it, with almost no change."

That taste for action helps drive Fuksas studio's productivity. The office has turned out jewelry (its "Islands" series of necklaces and bracelets, a collaboration with the artist Mimmo Paladino, debuted in 2006) and two new mirror designs in the last year alone (the amorphously contoured "Lucy" and "Rosy," both for Fiam), to say nothing of a series of elaborate temporary installations at the annual Milan Furniture Fair and elsewhere. In their entrepreneurial outlook as well as their bold aesthetic, the Fuksases display a brashness in their work, perhaps the product of two people whose intimate dynamic has tended to reinforce each other's instincts.

Yet for all their confidence, they are motivated not by the pursuit of banner projects for their own sake but by the same conviction that drove Bruno Zevi—a strong belief in the power of design as a force for good, especially in a fast-changing, diverse and increasingly global society. Italian-born Pritzker Prize–winner Richard Rogers, a friend for decades, says they "see architecture as I do, as a social art, not just a technological profession." As Massimiliano puts it: "We don't look only for new projects. We try to imagine another world."

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