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Luigi Snozzi: Kalman House, Locarno photograph © Thomas Deckker 1996
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Monte Carasso: The
re-invention of the site
Issues
in Architecture Art & Design
vol. 5 no. 2
[University of East London 1998] |
Luigi Snozzi: Monte Carasso: die
Wiedererfindung des Ortes
/ Monte
Carasso: la reinvenzione del sito
[Birkhäuser, Basle 1995]
From the terrace of the Castelgrande in Bellinzona one can look across
the Ticino valley and see, almost on axis on the opposite hillside, a
house by Mario Botta. The Botta house is a cool, abstract
object meticulously constructed in concrete blockwork, a sharp contrast
to the surrounding suburban development of the valley. Botta has
been famous for almost 25 years, and his works have been objects of
pilgrimage by visiting architects for at least as long.
Architects - quite rightly - have been repelled by the ubiquitous
suburban development of the valley - mostly in
'representational' styles found anywhere in Europe; Ticino
is under enormous pressure as a holiday playground. In publications of
Botta's work - and thus even more shocking in reality - these
surroundings have been largely edited out.
Yet one can visit the work of another generation of architects in
Ticino - Luigi Snozzi and Aurelio Galfetti - who engage these
surroundings. Why one might want to do this signifies, perhaps,
the central concern in architecture today. The difference between
Botta, on the one hand, and Snozzi and Galfetti, on the other, might be
said to mark a division between generations of architects as much as of
visitors; it is principally an attitude to site: and site, today, means
the city. While Botta necessarily presumed an amorphous site for
his geometrical objects, Snozzi and Galfetti are concerned with the
problematic areas of reconstruction and urban margins in which context
must be recognised.
Botta's works are, of course, of supreme integrity. Botta
(b. 1943) is truly a Modern wunderkind: working for Le Corbusier on the
Hospital project (1965) and for Louis Kahn on the Palazzo dei Congressi
project (1969) while studying under Carlo Scarpa, all in Venice.
These influences appear even in his early work, such as the House in
Riva San Vitale (1971-73), the magisterial School in Morbio Inferiore
(1972-77), or the Library for the Capuchin Convent in Lugano
(1976-79). His sensibilities of construction - in the
'poor' materials of concrete blockwork and fair-faced
concrete, of the structuring of form and space, and of natural light,
are sublime in their intensity.
Not all of Botta's recent work, however, has been so
successful. The Swiss Bank Union (1986-91) in Basle - where every
other building seems to be a bank anyway - is simplistic and vulgar;
the new Cathedral (1988-93) in Evry is pompous. Botta seems to
have been carried away by an excess of geometry. Such is his
veneration of Le Corbusier that he has published a collection of
writings and sketches in flagrant imitation of Le Corbusier - surely
the height of pretension. On the other hand, several of
Botta's more successfully-planned urban design projects have been
undertaken in collaboration with Snozzi - the Management Centre in
Perugia (1971) and Zürich Railway Station (1978), and Galfetti -
the Conference Centre in Marseilles (1988).
Snozzi's and Galfetti's upbringings have been far more
modest. Snozzi (b. 1932) studied at the Eidgenössische
Technische Hochschule [ETH] in Zurich from 1952 to 1957; he worked
briefly for the architect Rino Tami in Lugano, who was to design the
St. Gotthard autostrada in the 1960s. Since then, he has
supported his meagre commissions with teaching at the ETH in Zurich and
Lausanne. Galfetti (b. 1936) worked for Tita Carloni, another
important Ticino architect, in 1957, before studying at the ETH.
He, too, has been reliant on teaching at Lausanne. Despite the
limited geographical area of their practice - essentially between
Locarno and Bellinzona - and apparently limited opportunities - these
architects have managed to build some very provocative work.
The re-construction of the Castelgrande in Bellinzona (1980-92) is
probably Galfetti's best-known work. It is truly a
re-construction, as the original castle had virtually disappeared under
centuries of spoil. It knits the castle into the fabric of the
town, principally via the famous elevator, while providing some
indispensable functional spaces such as a restaurant and museum.
It is a work in many ways comparable to Scarpa's re-construction
of the Castelvecchio (1956-73) in Verona: clear distinctions have been
made between new and old, while both have served the creation of new
uses and places. The Castelgrande is rather more modest
historically and architecturally than the Castelvecchio, and the degree
of dereliction much greater, and consequently the re-construction has
been less about uncovering the historical and architectural density
than in the straight-forward creation of new places within the
fabric. This is the major divergence from Scarpa: Galfetti has
reconstructed parts of the original fabric, and some of the site, to
accentuate its spatial continuities.
As one moves from the terrace to the entrance courtyard of the
Castelgrande, a series of sites unfolds below: vacant sites among
nineteenth-century villas, unused and unfashionable historical
buildings, the flood plain of the Ticino river. These are the
typical marginal sites of the contemporary European city, and it is
these which are the place of the work of Galfetti and Snozzi.
Directly beneath the castle, among the nineteenth-century villas, are
Galfetti's 'Bianco e Nero' apartment buildings
(1986-87) ; on the flood plain are his Swimming Pool (1967-70) and
Tennis Club (1984-86), part of a development plan in which structure
was given to this amorphous area by robust concrete walls and
geometrical plan shapes. Botta's Telecommunications
Headquarters (1988-92) - a broken square in red-brick - is, thankfully,
basic and unpretentious.
Across the Ticino river lies the suburb of Monte Carasso. The
development of Monte Carasso has been dominated since 1978 by Snozzi,
who used it as a test-bed for his ideas on the construction of
urbanity, and it is this “grande
avventura
” which is described in Monte Carasso: die Wiedererfindung des
Ortes
/ Monte Carasso: la
reinvenzione del sito
. The cantonal piano regolatore envisaged it as a
dormitory suburb of Bellinzona - a low-density centre-less
agglomeration - but Snozzi, at the invitation of the comune, proposed
an alternative: a definitive centre, and an increase in the density of
the facilities and the fabric. The wishes of the comune were
facilitated by three things: firstly, the patent benefits of
Snozzi's plan; secondly, the determination and resources of the
mayor and the local inhabitants; and thirdly, the willingness of the
planners to let the piano regolatore
be guided by specifically architectural proposals. Snozzi defined
his objectives for the new works as:
I
nuovi interventi devono essere effetuati nel rispetto della struttura
architettonica e urbanistica esistente e comunque nel confronto con la
stessa.
That is, they must simultaneously respect the existing architectonic
and urban structure and establish a confrontation with it. There
is a total rejection of historicism in their design and relation to
site; they are placed in a purely topographical manner. This is,
for Snozzi, the central issue of architecture: that the focus of
interest in a work is the relations it enters into with its site, and
not the work itself; it is a metaphor for the political relations of
its inhabitants to the city. To emphasise its topographical
relations, Snozzi has stripped his work of all extraneous references,
whether formal - he uses only basic cubic shapes, or constructional -
although his works are beautifully made in in-situ concrete; experience
of the buildings reveals how these are animated by light, view, and
movement.
This design vocabulary may be found equally in the holiday house of a
wealthy patron, such as the Kalman house (1975) in Locarno, or to
low-cost housing; Snozzi was well known for his houses long before the
plan for Monte Carasso. The Kalman house, for example, is
concrete box with one open end; it recalls Le Corbusier's maison
'Citrohan' (1920), with the solarium removed and placed on
the site as a pergola. But Snozzi's apparent involvement
with Modernism is not a simple transformation; while the maison
'Citrohan' was a metaphor for, as well as product of, the
machine age, the Kalman house is material and experiential. The
house is organised around a curved retaining wall, which distorts the
open end of the box and extends out to form a pergola overlooking Lago
Maggiore. The staircase runs through a three-storey-high
light-filled void along this retaining wall (the entrance is at
basement level). There is no distinction between columns and
walls - all surfaces, except the floor in red tiles, are in rendered
concrete.
This attitude to topography may also be seen in a major scale in Monte
Carasso. To create a centre for Monte Carasso, Snozzi proposed to
site a new school, with a church and mayoral offices, around a piazza
within a former Augustine convent, which had been completely submerged
beneath nineteenth-century developments. Such is the success of
the piazza that it is now used for summer festivals. The convent
has been restored in a manner reminiscent of Scarpa's
re-construction of the Castelvecchio or Galfetti's of the
Castelgrande, with very clear new elements juxtaposed against the old
fabric. The new fabric of the school - the enormous light hoods
over the classrooms (could these be derived from Le Corbusier's
Venice Hospital project?) not only act as a new, serial, form to be
read against the existing fabric, but are inhabitable as separate study
areas within each classroom. Other buildings were placed around
the convent to reinforce its presence: the Palestra (1979-84) - a
gymnasium, the so-called Casa del Sindaco (1984) - actually the Casa
Guidotti - the mayor's house, and the Banca Raiffeisen
(1984). The gymnasium is a glorious light-filled basilica
reminiscent of Kahn; here the comune, to enable Snozzi's scheme
to be realised, refused a subsidy on its construction costs from the
army, who wanted to use it - with certain modifications - for military
training.
In place of the low-density residential development envisaged in the
piano regolatore, with houses set in the middle of their plots, Snozzi
proposed such planning heresies as 'filling in' between
existing houses to increase the density - such as the Casa Marisoli,
and reinforcing the definition of the town - such as the Casa Briccola
- a tower house - by Snozzi's pupil Ricardo Briccola. The
edge of the town adjacent to the autostrada is further defined by a
long wall of low-cost housing, the 'Quartiere Monrenal'
currently under construction. These new forms were approved
by assessing two proposals - one following the piano regolatore, the
other as Snozzi preferred. No cases of dissent are
recorded. It may seem surprising - if not unbelievable - that the
cantonal planners were prepared to alter the piano regolatore to agree
with specifically architectural proposals; they had already shown an
awareness, however, of the special nature of the landscape in Ticino in
the design of the St. Gotthard autostrada,
which runs through the entire valley (and separates Monte Carasso from
Bellinzona).
The use of serial forms, such as the light hoods at the convent, must
be understood as a specifically contemporary form of composition, as
against the hierarchical and symmetrical form of the 17th-century
convent. This is brought out clearly in drawings showing the
original - axial - and reconstructed - serial - plans of the
convent. Snozzi blurs the distinctions of sculpture,
architecture, urbanism, and landscape design. His approach links
him to artists such as Richard Serra and Donald Judd; his work would
not look out of place among Judd's '15 Concrete
Boxes' (1979) at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa.
What, then, is the value of Snozzi's work? The
'European city' so provocatively proposed by Rossi in the
1960s had by the 1970s become the site of the public display of
consumption, the apotheosis of the consumer society. A
statement by Guy Debord springs to mind:
The entire life of
those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail
presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All
that was once directly lived has become mere representation.
Snozzi's work is the architecture of resistance to the spatial
and environmental degradation of the consumer society. He seeks
to re-establish personal relations with collective urban life. He
chooses to do this in a progressive, rather than a regressive manner: a
rejection of historicism in favour of experience through form,
material, light, view, movement, and topography.
Thomas Deckker
London 1998 |
Thomas Deckker illustrated his article with photographs taken in Switzerland in 1996. |
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