Cino Zucchi

Talking with Cino Zucchi, one of the most accomplished and respected architects in contemporary European architecture, means looking and thinking about the role of research as an instrument for poetic and critical exploration of the present time and its concerns and worries, and doing so without descending into facile rhetoric yet while focusing on the central issues for a reconsideration of the role of design for the near future.

L.M.
We are living in an era in which it is necessary to think again about design as a form of research. The real world is asking us urgent questions about energy, the environment, climate change, social imbalances and increasing disparities. In a certain sense architecture has to be part of this changing world. I believe that returning to the idea of design as a form of conscious, critical research, and reflection on the specific tools used within architecture is important. What does design as a form of research mean to you, and how necessary is it today?

C.Z.
You started with a challenging question. Throughout the history of every artistic practice, it is possible to see a cyclical succession of moments in which the discipline looks for itself within its own actions – what Aldo Rossi would have called ‘disciplinary autonomy’ in the 1960s – and moments when, dissatisfied with its own rules, it looks around to find freshness and truth in completely different fields. This broad perspective is entirely positive, although I believe that architects are among the greatest trivializers of terms taken from sciences and philosophy. In the last century they did it with the concept of space-time and the theory of relativity, but today the sources are different. The environmental emergency, gender studies, social inequalities, and advancements in artificial intelligence are at the centre of our thoughts and thinking. However, the key question is how – beyond the various fanfares that emerge from Biennial pavilions – these concerns can generate concrete actions in our work. The ‘messianic’ accents of Le Corbusier’s Architecture or Revolution can be faintly picked up in the television appearances of today’s architectural gurus, who are necessary for the media system just like the bullying chef, the barefoot environmentalist, the gay in makeup and sequins and the tattooed rapper. In our discipline, academic formalism quickly descends into the ridiculous, but there is also an equal and complementary ridiculousness in the architect who is claiming to save the planet.

Despite being in the second phase of my professional career – a phase that easily leads to compromises and hypocrisies – I consider myself an ‘early environmentalist’. Back in 1975, I read the M.I.T. research paper entitled The Limits to Growth – the first real warning about the environmental emergency – and I was so deeply impressed by it that I applied for enrollment in the same institution. Recently, I found my notes from a design workshop in 1977 that discussed ‘user needs’ and which criticized standard housing typologies by subjecting them to ruthless checks with virtual users – a lesbian couple, a night watchman – who didn’t fit into the typical ‘happy family’ of the American dream.

Once back in Italy, my intellectual curiosity swung to the opposite extreme, and I dedicated myself to the study of architectural treatises from the 16th and 17th centuries and their relationship with the everyday construction of cities. The outcome of this research resulted in 1989 in a scholarly book on the architecture of Milanese courtyards from that period. Its philological rigour earned the respect of historians but looking back, I would now consider it as an early sign of my interest in the relationship between ‘high brow’ and ‘low brow’ culture, between the extreme sophistications of abstract speculation and the ideas that passed from it into everyday building practice through what Dan Sperber called “the contagion of ideas”.

Both scientific research and humanistic culture, explored with great dedication, have allowed me to develop a kind of protective shield against those who use knowledge or its simulacra as improper weapons. True research moves with rigour but without certainties, it looks at procedures as tools and not as ends, and is always ready to revise its assumptions. Pure data collection is not capable in any case of generating a formula or a theory. It needs a genuine act of invention that does not exist within them – an intelligent and cultured ‘educated guess’ – which is then immediately checked with experimental data and modified. Charles Sanders Peirce calls this process ‘abduction’, and to explain it, he even resorts to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”. Every stage of research needs false steps, corrections, and sudden changes of direction.

Johann Heinrich Füssli’s dictum that “in art, many beautiful things are found by chance, but they are preserved by choice” anticipates the theses of Jacques Monod’s in his Chance and Necessity, which asserts that mutation and innovation occur by chance and become consolidated within the organism only if compatible with its structure. This sometimes happens through what Stephen Jay Gould in The Panda’s Thumb calls ‘exaptation’, i.e. the use of an organ or apparatus for a role other than its original one; how often does this happen in architecture! Therefore, I would change the famous modernist aphorism of “form follows function” to something like “form embraces function”; it welcomes it, accommodates it and sometimes even exalts it, but it is not mechanically derived from it.

In today’s world, which is obsessed with procedures and product certification, we are often asked for premature performance and certainties. Clients seek reassurance through linear flow charts, and every day the market generates new professional specialists and experts who validate specific segments of the long DNA chain that makes up design. The concept of procedural correctness has replaced the judgment of value regarding the final result. It is now axiomatic and firmly believed that a diligently followed process will necessarily lead to a good outcome, but often the result only displays a ‘guaranteed mediocrity’. Apart from one or two sporadic cases of enlightened patronage – I still recall the research exhibition commissioned by Prada and entrusted to Rem Koolhaas and Herzog & De Meuron – international finance tends to prefer ‘easy listening’ projects, professional products obtained through predetermined paths capable of ensuring consensus.

L.M.
For me this concept is central. There is currently a kind of schizophrenia between on the one hand a high-performing and at the same time coercive technocracy in which architects now find themselves almost combining pre-processed and industry-prepared materials; they are almost being called upon to put together bits and pieces. On the other hand, there is the idea of the architect as author, which is what I consider you to be. This theme is becoming increasingly complicated and difficult. What does it mean to work on this ever-narrowing balance?

C.Z.
Let me try and correct this common concept of the ‘author’ with a quote from Massimo Bontempelli: “The supreme ideal of all artists should be to become anonymous. The fundamental task of the poet is to invent myths, fables and stories that then move away from the creator until they lose all connection with his person and thus become a common heritage for humanity, almost something of nature. This is what happens to works of architecture; we often ignore the author of the most famous monuments which have become one as naturally as possible with their soil and climate.”

This idea of the ‘disappearance’ of the author in the face of his work is common with great authors like Giacomo Leopardi, Arthur Schopenhauer and my beloved Gustave Flaubert, who wrote “the author in his work must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and everywhere invisible” and “Masterpieces are stupid. They have a tranquil expression like the productions of nature itself, like large animals and mountains”.

I think in general that there are two kinds of authors, different in attitude but equally talented. The first open up a thematic vein, limiting their research to a clearly defined perimeter with lexical and syntactic traits that are transferred from work to work. The attitude or approach of the second group exists, but it is more difficult to identify in a ‘style’ or in constant linguistic traits unique to the author. With these, the language of each work is reinvented every time in relation to its specific content, and often their works show no formal similarities. They are also authors, but their ‘signature’ is less recognizable in the work, and it is more challenging to imitate their modus operandi or create a parody.

The first genre might well include Federico Fellini in the world of cinema, Joan Baez in music, and Richard Meier or Daniel Libeskind in architecture. Among the second group, I would count Stanley Kubrick – who directed such diverse productions as 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, Lolita, or Barry Lyndon – in this last one he used only natural light and candles – adapting editing and photography each time to suit the subject; or The Beatles with their double White Album, where you won’t find a song with the same arrangement as another, ranging from electronic avant-garde techniques to country and psychedelia. Also in this second group, after Karl Friedrich Schinkel, I would include Franco Albini in Italy – with the rustic Pirovano shelter in Cervinia, the Rinascente in Rome, the exterior cladding in orange fiberglass for the SNAM offices in San Donato, or the marvellous reinforced concrete tholos of the Tesoro di San Lorenzo in Genoa; then there would be the cynical and talented Philip Johnson, Rafael Moneo and today Herzog & de Meuron. Their projects astound me with their intelligence, lack of preordained solutions and their ability to interpret a specific theme through inventions and ever-changing languages.

To continue with the musical metaphors, if an architect of the last century could be compared to a composer, today their work resembles that of a DJ. The ‘blank slate’ elementalism and abstraction of Piet Mondrian or Hannes Meyer were prominent features of the last century; but after Andy Warhol, the manipulation of images or the sampling of sounds can produce original works that are  often very different from their sources.

In light of what was said earlier, I would go so far as to describe what you have defined as ‘authorship’ as ‘interpretation’. This emphasizes not so much the expression of the author’s subjectivity but his/her ability to observe, filter and arrange the data relating to a problem and finding a specific ‘theme’ within that creates cohesion between the different parts of the work. In the lexical epidemic caused by the media today, there is constant abuse of the adjective ‘iconic’ which seems to be seen as a necessary attribute for consensus and communication of an object, whether it be lipstick, a car, or architecture. However, I believe that the formal evidence and clarity that good architecture can or should have must arise from a more profound structure that reveals itself more prominently in certain points than others.

The ‘technocracy’ you mentioned is now combined with an obsession for protocols and certifications that are often used as badges such as of ISO 9001, LEED, BREEAM, NZEB and WELL; it seems that every day someone invents a new one. Important themes such as the environment, social commitment and individual well-being, which should be essential and foundational values of design, have just become a ‘box-ticking’ exercise in a financial and commercial program where they have to be included in a certified and communicable form. On the other hand, there is a symmetrical fetishism for technology – or rather for its figures and emblems – which is often seen as an element that erases suspicion of arbitrariness and subjectivity in architectural forms. The display of hi-tech details gives a work a sense of security and prestige, generating a kind of automatic but superficial appreciation; the metal spider fittings invented by Peter Rice for the Villette greenhouses have now become a calculated effect, a sort of ‘architectural garter belt’.

In my everyday work, I use elements or fragments of scientific techniques or historical knowledge assembling them in an ‘artistic’ manner, meaning they are mere tools used to achieve the desired result. As such, I do not attribute intrinsic value to any technique, procedure, or knowledge possessed by myself or others, but rather evaluate them critically in relation to the objective. You don’t use a sledgehammer to crack a walnut, nor do you cut a steel tube with a plastic knife: every problem has its appropriate tool, not the other way around.

L.M.
Even so, in this case and despite all the filters, the role of vision and formal thinking must have an inclusive and generous character, as well as the capacity to support the tensions resulting from dialogue and confrontation to the point of enduring and ultimately becoming a finished and built form. Perhaps the strength of architectural thinking lies in its ability to be recognizable and inclusive, despite its formal dimension. This is effectively inevitable; otherwise, we would have nothing but large boxes.

C.Z.
One of the most challenging themes of the contemporary era is the expression or representation of concepts – whether individual or collective – outside of a shared ‘social contract’ that establishes a connection between forms and ideas. The famous Iconologia or Description of Images of Virtues, Vices, Affections, Human Passions, Celestial Bodies, the World and its Parts, the Work of Cesare Ripa Perugino, Necessary Labor for Orators, Preachers, Poets, Emblem and Impresa Makers, Sculptors, Painters, Designers, Representators, Architects, and Apparatus Dividers to depict with its own symbols everything that can fall into human thought served no other purpose than to reconcile people regarding the meaning of figures and representations. Today, this idea of sharing no longer seems possible and we have replaced it with the dreadful term ‘concept’.

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to design a church, one of the most challenging subjects for architects precisely due to the aforementioned issue. Some architects try to directly represent the otherworldly character of the theme; the result is often what Gio Ponti called “Pinocchio churches”, where structural expressionism aims to say, “I come directly from up there”. Others, on the other hand, accept the church as a human product dedicated to God, a kind of ‘well-built and decorated barn’ like the Porziuncola or Sant’Ambrogio in Milan. Places of worship are some of the most interesting products of human culture, which has experimented with many different forms until some of them have acquired an element of stability. There is no true ‘revealed’ architecture capable of interpreting the essence of a religion absolutely, but rather a series of different hypotheses generated over time and space, which are selected and refined through social consensus. The Hagia Sophia in Istanbul appears to us today as ‘the’ icon of a mosque, yet it was created as a church; the architecture of synagogues does not have a unified model but varies in relation to the historical places of the Jewish diaspora.

Henri Focillon’s text The Life of Forms talks about the continuously changing relationship between forms and concepts, between signs and content: “Iconography can be conceived in different ways, both as a variation of forms with the same meaning, and as a variation of meanings of the same form. Both methods highlight equally the respective independence of the two terms. Sometimes form exerts a kind of magnetism on different meanings or rather presents itself as a kind of hollow mould, into which man on occasions pours entirely different materials, which submit to the curve that presses down on them and thus acquire an unexpected significance. Sometimes the obsessive fixity of the same meaning acquires formal experiences that it has not necessarily caused”.

Words and forms take on meaning only in the tangible circumstances of their use. A contemporary design must renegotiate the proposed forms each time in relation to the subjective taste of those involved in the process – from the client to the landscape commission to those overseeing the project – but it must still try to embrace a collective sentiment that makes them its own, fills them with sense, and considers them suitable for representing the values that unite people. When this happens, it is a real joy for me, something that consoles me and encourages me during the more difficult moments of our work.

L.M.
I have always believed that good architecture survives its initial function. In fact, it’s part of the ability of architecture to have generous forms, to adapt to functions and situations that it may not have even considered at the outset. This is perhaps one of the great limitations of 20th century architecture, which was often conceived in such rigidly monofunctional ways that it wasn’t generous enough to embrace changes.

C.Z.
I agree with you 100%. As Adolf Behne stated in his The Modern Functional Building from 1923: “While the functionalist seeks the maximum possible adaptation to a very specific purpose, the rationalist seeks adaptation to the greatest number of possibilities. Nothing is more understandable than the rationalist placing particular emphasis on form. The solitary individual, isolated in the midst of nature, has no formal problem. The question of form arises with the union of multiple individuals, and form is what makes coexistence among men possible”.

Architectural form cannot survive as an individual act but must at some point be confirmed by the ‘social contract’ which Hobbes spoke about. Architecture must reconcile the views of numerous people, yet this doesn’t mean that it should be based solely on an exit poll, as happens today in the debate about skyscrapers in Milan or other European cities. Newspapers and blogs contain entirely contradictory individual judgments. Do we possess shared canons, or are the expressed opinions merely micro-aesthetics of many different ‘taste lobbies’ perpetually fighting each other? Architecture suffers greatly from this instability and a lack of common aesthetic criteria. Today, visual artists can produce pieces of work through completely arbitrary gestures, since their success will be determined by the market, which is divided into numerous different groups that ignore or snub each other. Architects lack the means to construct what they have conceived, and thus in order to see the final outcome of their work in three dimensions, they must necessarily deal with the economic situation and social expectations. I still do not know if architecture is an art, but if it is, it is certainly slower, heavier and more expensive than many of its sister art forms.

L.M.
Today, there is sometimes a lack of communal comprehension of words and their meanings. As a consequence, when we don’t share the same words, we have difficulty in defining the various forms of design and in reaching a kind of social consensus about them. At present, this state of confusion is at its height. You began by stating “I have been an environmentalist from the very beginning” and you started from the sources that beginning from the 1960s, reflected on the crisis of modernity as a form of consuming or using up our planet. As such, your point of view in terms of thinking about energy is broader, more encompassing; it doesn’t turn ecology into a language but rather into a way of thinking that guides design. Since this is a subject with great social and symbolic importance, not to say delicacy, could you expand your thoughts on this?

C.Z.
First and foremost, I would like to distinguish between two complementary dimensions that are often confused. The first is the subject of individual ethics, which I take for granted, as they are part of the values of this century, while the second is the actual effectiveness of collective action, which operates on entirely different scales. Buying a recycled Freitag bag or using a metal water bottle demonstrates our commitment, but it certainly won’t save the planet. The only actions capable of truly reducing global greenhouse gas emissions are to have fewer children, drastically reduce air travel, limit global manufacturing specialization and thus global trade, and perhaps ‘prevent’ India and China from achieving our economic standards. These would require a world government – almost like in Star Wars – and a limitation of individual freedoms that are incompatible with our values. My scientific education often causes me to shudder when I hear the countless falsifications or lies regarding so-called ‘eco-friendly architecture’, even though this is highly effective as a communication standpoint.

Despite our design research being constantly committed to ‘responsive buildings’ and the use of renewable energy sources – the Salewa headquarters in Bolzano and Lavazza in Turin guarantee very high environmental quality with truly low energy consumption – I still believe that one of the main factors is the durability of buildings over time. A significant portion of energy is expended during the construction of a building, and thus this ‘initial investment’ – the so-called ‘embedded energy’ – must be diluted over as long a period as possible. If we consider the factors of solidity and longevity in current constructions, it is clear that their ventilated walls, drywalls, and silicone sealants truly do not compare with Piero Portaluppi’s Villa Necchi and its marvellous elliptical stone steps; in the end, 19th and early 20th century cities reveal an ecological dimension that is often overlooked, and their reuse becomes an important act in favour of the environment.

L.M.
What is your relationship with what we now call artificial intelligence? How do you relate to it, experience it, and feel about it in relation to your work as an architect?

C.Z.
During my years at MIT, I took a course on artificial intelligence and learned to program in LISP, which was considered a kind of ‘divine language’ at the time because it seemed to defy Gödel’s second theorem. I have always been interested in the research and ideas of Douglas Hofstadter, who was perhaps the first to deal with the theme of meaning and understanding in conditions of semantic ambiguity. His ‘bottom-up’ intelligent machines, to which he assigned problems that required understanding what we could call ‘style’ – a complex term that does not define an object but rather a series of relationships – are in a sense the forerunners of current programs like Dall-E, Stable Diffusion, or Midjourney. I haven’t had the time to play with them yet, but I follow artists or architects on Instagram, such as Neptuneglitterball or Matias del Campo, whose experiments I find very sophisticated. However, while the early AI systems sought to mimic the structure of our brain’s neural networks, the incredible progress of recent years is related to their self-learning. In other words, today’s AI provides perfect answers, but we can no longer reconstruct its mechanisms of action; in a sense – and this is what worries experts who have called for a moratorium on research – we now ‘don’t know what or how it thinks’ anymore. Many years ago, David Bowie prophetically described the Internet as “an alien entity with a life of its own”, and we are beginning to feel the same about AI. Returning to our field, there is a beautiful essay by Douglas Hofstadter called Variations on a Theme as the Crux of Creativity which perfectly represents my ‘method of work’. He argues that instead of seeking a new truth outside every existing structure, many discoveries in the artistic or scientific field are made by inserting a deviation into a known game – here I immediately think of the clinamen that Lucretius in following Epicurus, saw as the origin of things – and thus rigorously following its unexpected developments.

In my design process, I temporarily ‘turn off’ the faculty of taste – taste alone cannot generate anything, it only chooses – and let the mind freely generate forms and spaces. Then, I ‘turn on’ taste again and assess how these free forms respond to function, construction, economy and the figurative conventions of my era. The liberated mind produces unexpected forms, and taste or reasoning selects some and refines them. Once again, it is a ‘Darwinian’ mechanism not so far from what Christopher Alexander advocated in his Notes on the Synthesis of Form. In this process of alternating between rapid invention and selection in order to approach the desired solution, the AI programs mentioned earlier can easily experience the initial step. In the so-called ‘prompts’ given to Midjourney, we could make requests like “remake Bicycle Thieves as directed by Quentin Tarantino” or “design architecture in the style of Mies van der Rohe with a strong ethnic-tribal tone” and then select the results until we are satisfied. However, AI must still leave the final choice to humans. The danger I see in the younger generations is a blind trust and the inability to verify results obtained from a machine. The increasingly powerful tendency to delegate decisions, whether technical, political, ethical or formal to AI is greatly limiting people’s critical abilities. Several young architects tend not to check errors in an Excel sheet caused by data input mistakes, and young engineers using finite element analysis programs no longer have an intuitive sense of how forces are distributed within a structure. If the architect or engineer of the future is going to be simply someone who knows how to ask the machine the ‘right questions’, they must also maintain critical thinking towards the results and ‘disengage autopilot’ whenever necessary.

The prevailing mechanism of continuously drawing and metamorphosing figurative or textual ‘memes’ in order to adapt them to our problem means that a vast number of people are unable to verify the truth and correctness of the sources they draw from, thus greatly amplifying the distribution and spreading of errors contained in the original. As a professor, I am interested in understanding the new teaching methods required in this ‘outsourcing of factual knowledge’ represented by the Internet and Wikipedia, both of which I use daily in my research. We should never lament the past but rather understand what aspects of our education and knowledge are most valuable to pass on to younger generations. I often share ancient and obsolete knowledge with them – like the difference between the mouldings of an Ionic and an Attic base, or the trompe designed in the Chateau d’Anet by Philibert Delorme – enveloping it with irony and affection. Some things will be lost, some things will be preserved, and something wonderful and new will be invented. Passion and intellectual honesty are things that pass implicitly rather than explicitly between individuals, and this also happens with the marvellous heritage of material culture represented by Europe itself, which becomes part of our bodies and souls as we sip a cerveza, a pastis, or an ouzo in the bars of its magnificent cities.

Text by Luca Molinari


Captions and Photo credit (from top to bottom)

– Cover – Photo © Guido Stazzoni
– Portrait of Cino Zucchi – Photo © Guido Stazzoni
– Portrait by Roberto Malfatti
– Portrait of Cino Zucchi
– Cino Zucchi DJ
– Augmented Architecture, installation at the INTERNI event for Mapei, 2021
– Ark office building in Bordeaux Euratlantique, 2017 – 2023
– Cascina Merlata social housing in Milan, 2011 – 2021
– Cavallerizza Reale di Torino – International competition, 1st Prize, 2023 – ongoing
– Salewa headquarters in Bolzano – with Park Associati, 2007 – 2011
– Lavazza headquarters in Turin, 2010 – 2018
– MIT, Cino Zucchi’s artificial intelligence 1977
– Pedrali automated warehouse, Mornico al Serio (BG), 2014 – 2016

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