Architects Can Act Extra Like DJs: In dialog with Cino Zucchi
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Architect Cino Zucchi (b. 1955) grew up and practices in Milan, Italy. He was trained at MIT in Cambridge and the Politecnico di Milano, but claims to be largely self-taught, although influenced by such of his countrymen as Aldo Rossi and Manfredo Tafuri. He is internationally known for diverse projects across Europe. Many are both abstracted and contextual residential complexes in Italy, particularly in Milan, Bologna, Parma, Ravenna, and, most notably, in Venice. Zucchi’s D residential building in Giudecca, attracted international attention and praise when it was completed in 2003. I met Cino Zucchi last year during the Venice Architecture Biennale; that meeting led to an extensive interview that we recently engaged in over Zoom between New York and the architect’s sunlight and books-filled Milan studio.
We discussed symbolism behind putting trees on skyscrapers, why mediocre buildings can pass as “good” ones, about his preference for interpretation and manipulation over invention, the need to find a proper language for each new occasion, fascination with so-called “reversed engineering,” why we need quiet buildings, and his thoughts on contemporary Italian architecture. The following is an edited excerpt from our conversation.
Cino Zucchi: I consider myself a very “engaged” architect in the fields of environmental protection and social integration, but I still believe that many of my colleagues are overly optimistic and ambitious in their assumptions that their designs can “save the world.”
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Vladimir Belogolovsky: Let’s consider some examples to better illustrate this thinking.
CZ: For example, putting trees on skyscrapers generates strong icons and can have a positive pedagogical influence, but if we look at the real numbers, its impact on the environment is rather alarming. The real causes of climate change are such as the increase of the world’s population, the betterment of its average wealth and therefore, increased consumption of just about everything. Or, take roundtrip flights by a single person from Milan to New York—it will put in the atmosphere ten times the amount of CO2 (approximately one ton) than an average inhabitant of Mali would generate in an entire year (approximately 100 kilos). So, “Sustainability,” one of the most urgent issues of this new millennium, has become mostly a slogan or a way of self-advertisement in the hands of many architects and developers. May I say that people use the word “Nature” today, as in the past, they used the word “God.”
In 1974, I read the report The Limits to Growth by Donella Meadows and the MIT research team and I got so scared that I applied to her institution, where in 1978, I earned a Bachelor of Science degree. I have been working on environmental issues since my youth, but today I consider my design work “sustainable” in different ways—it tries to be adaptive, non-deterministic, robust, and able to welcome change without insisting on constant rebuilding on both urban and building scale. Both sustainability and social actions should be an implicit part of our practice. Their fulfilment is essential, but that fact alone does not make a good building. Today, both critics and the public seem to be unable to discuss the issue of architectural quality itself, and so, architects use these arguments to make their way through the various levels of judgement, whether their projects are “good.” We can see many mediocre buildings are being advertised with such slogans.
VB: You initially studied architecture at MIT and then at Politecnico di Milano. What were some of the most important lessons that you learned from those formative experiences?
CZ: I attended MIT in the late 1970s. It was the time when Post-Modernism was becoming fashionable in America. What I learned from my experience there is mostly related to the high-level education in mathematics, physics, artificial intelligence, and research-based attitude. The idea was that you are looking for something you don’t know yet. To do that, you must suspend all your assumptions and prejudices. One of the writings that influenced my approach is Variations on a Theme as the Crux of Creativity by Douglas Hofstadter, where he states that a lot of discoveries in science and in the arts are not reached by canceling the previous knowledge, but rather by inserting small variations of what we already know and through coherent accumulation of consequences that follow.
When I came back to Italy to study at the Polytechnic, I went to the other extreme by initiating a painstaking research on Renaissance and Baroque courtyards in Milan and the architectural culture that generated their forms. For different reasons and indirectly, people who influenced my thinking the most were such architects as Aldo Rossi, Manfredo Tafuri, and Pierluigi Nicolin, the director of Lotus International magazine since 1978. But, in a way, I could say that I have no parents. [Laughs.] I am largely self-taught; this does not mean that I don’t have many intellectual debts, but their patterns can be very contradictory.
I don’t believe in a fixed, deterministic relation between forms and meanings. Today, we identify Hagia Sophia as the archetype of a mosque, but it was originally built as a church. Often forms empty themselves from the use and meaning they were conceived for and refill with a new one. So, “form follows function” is a largely fictitious statement by now. But I find this “ballet” of forms and meanings, changing over time, quite stimulating. For example, in the era of reinforced concrete and steel, we would have to disregard the need for an arch. But an arch is also an icon. That’s what explains its sudden resurrection in the architectural projects of the last five-ten years. Everybody is doing arches today; it is becoming almost a fashion, and this cannot be reasoned as something “functional.”
VB: The arch is one symbol that comes and goes since the beginning of the Modern Movement.
CZ: Sure, it is like an underground river that comes to surface in different times and places regardless of its contempt by the Modernists as a symbol of the past. In the 1920s history was dismissed, and artist like Mondrian started from a blank slate, reinventing a simplified, supposedly “pure” alphabet. Architects refused to dress skyscrapers to mimic such historical examples as St Mark’s Campanile. The foundations of a “brave new world” had to be established. In some historical periods you are obliged to start from scratch, but I don’t think that every generation should do that. For example, Andy Warhol showed us how you can produce fresh art by manipulation of pre-existing imagesachieved through collage, displacement, and postproduction. You don’t always need to invent a new language to say new things. Today, instead of being composers and inventors, artists and architects can act more like DJs. As architects, we need to be both inventive and interpretative.
VB: Can you say that about your own work?
CZ: Yes, I can. My work is often more about interpretation and manipulation than invention. Sometimes, the first two can go further than the latter. Also, what I sometimes do could be similar to what is called “reverse engineering,”—you look at an existing artifact or a situation that already works, you take it apart to examine its components or aspects, and you put it back together making it better.
VB: Speaking of reverse engineering, do you ever go to your own buildings, years later, to see how they perform to be able to respond and fine-tune your ideas in your next project?
CZ: I certainly do, and I do it repeatedly! [Laughs.] I put on my dark “Men in Black” sunglasses and investigate on the results of my design decisions, spying on people to know what they feel and think about them. The other day, I was in the Nuovo Portello, here in Milan, and I was watching a teenage couple siting on a stone bench, while making out. When we were designing it years ago, we called it the “kissing bench.” I was pleased that it was used that way.
I am always interested in going back to learn both from successes and failures, following Samuel Beckett’s famous statement, “Fail. Fail again. Fail better.” Sometimes, people invite me to their homes, and I learn a lot from those encounters. That’s why I would rather design a quiet building or a house that people love than an “iconic project” or just a statement to be published in architectural magazines or on Instagram. A built transformation of the environment lasts much longer that the consumption of its image and must work well even when the latter goes out of fashion.
VB: Going back to see how your own projects perform over time is very revealing about the way you work. How would you then identify a progression from one project to the next? What is it you learn and how do you apply that knowledge in your new work?
CZ: In all the arts there are two kinds of artists. The first kind picks on a theme and variates on it, going deeper and deeper. The second one tries to invent or find a proper language for each new occasion. In filmmaking, Fellini is more of the first kind, whereas Stanley Kubrick represents the second. In music, Joan Baez is the first and the Beatles’ Double White Album (where each song is a masterpiece on its own) is the second. In architecture, my friend, Alberto Campa Baeza could be seen as belonging to the first kind, whereas Herzog & de Meuron to the second.
Even if these two directions are equally producing great works, personally, I feel closer to the second attitude. For every new project I would like to find a peculiar character. Of course, I also have themes that bounce and resonate from one project to the next until they find their best state, but most of my projects do not resemble each other, or at least, that is what I would like to happen.
In every project I am trying to introduce—along with simple, intuitive concepts and straightforward spaces—alterations and references that can generate multiple resonances; projects should not interfere with everyday perception and use, but only enrich them and make them more vibrant. Walter Benjamin once stated that architecture is best appreciated in a state of distraction. Architecture should gladly accept to be a background to our lives.
VB: In a way, your architecture falls between pursuing a deeper analysis and being inventive. Your work is restrained in many ways.
CZ: Some architects work as technicians, using a lot of analysis of initial data and tests, while others behave like artists, inventing figures and testing them afterwards. Years ago, I had the lucky occasion to team up in an urban design competition both with Norman Foster and Frank Gehry. Norman, apparently, needed to test the performance of its proposals in the wind tunnel or in sunshade simulators, whereas Frank would just crash a piece of paper or pile up wood blocks to see if they worked.
Between these two extremes of sheer “analysis” and sheer “invention,” I like to describe my design attitude with the term of “interpretation.” Interpretation contains both the observation of the existing data and of the site and the decision to focus on something rather than something else, amplifying its weight to reach the desired result.
Christopher Alexander states in his Notes on the Synthesis of Form that “the project is the part of the world we decide to change, while the context is the part of the world we decide to leave as is,” considering, of course, all the interactions between the two.
VB: What building built in Italy since 2000, would you name as the most significant one and why?
CZ: That’s like asking—What’s your favorite song?! I think the best Italian architect right now is Francesca Torzo, even if her little masterpiece is in Belgium. Grafton Architects “discovered” her in the last Biennale, and she begins to be appreciated worldwide. I am not sure that today national borders are so interesting anymore. I love contamination and cross-fertilization of ideas and forms, for as long as we can still distinguish differences and not melt everything in the stream of global indistinctive cliché images. What do people mean when they speak about “Italian architecture?” Maybe the term “European architecture” could still encircle a cluster of sensibilities and attitudes, but I am not even sure about that. Some years ago, Rafael Moneo wrote about the idea of interpretation of the context and critical thinking as the most distinctive qualities of Italian architecture. He also stated that after the death of Aldo Rossi, the most internationally well-known Italian architect became Renzo Piano, yet he sees his work animated more by the Anglo-Saxon idea of the relation between technology and nature, which Pierluigi Nicolin called “techno-pastoral.”
Interestingly, my own work—particularly the D Building [1996-2003] in the urban renewal of the Junghans factory on the island of Giudecca in Venice—is considered by critics abroad among the most relevant architectural statements of contemporary Italy, strongly related to its context but not nostalgic. When the building was built, I was told by many foreign architects, particularly by my friend, Peter Wilson, “Cino, you showed all of Europe that it is possible to go back to reflect on historical prototypes without necessarily copying Aldo Rossi, and to adapt to specific urban settings without reproducing them literally. You put Italian architecture back in the game.” In my Giudecca project these architects found both abstractness and contextualism, with traditional motives—as the wooden window shutters or the white Istria stone cornices are reinterpreted in very fresh, contemporary ways.
And if we don’t limit the choice to just Italian architects, I would name the School of Economics building at the Luigi Bocconi University in Milan [2008] by Grafton Architects as one of the best realizations. Their profound volumes in Ceppo stone make a bold statement, and they manage to reconnect the edges of a broken urban block and create a new public space at its feet. To end this stimulating interview, I would say that civilizations always dialogued among each other. They found Roman coins in India and China; in Bukhara the same building that was used as a mosque in the morning, could serve as a synagogue in the afternoon.
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