{"id":12742,"date":"2014-09-29T21:31:48","date_gmt":"2014-09-29T19:31:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.area-arch.it\/grafting-a-skype-conversation-between-steven-holl-and-cino-zucchi-2\/"},"modified":"2015-07-22T17:12:42","modified_gmt":"2015-07-22T15:12:42","slug":"grafting-a-skype-conversation-between-steven-holl-and-cino-zucchi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.area-arch.it\/en\/grafting-a-skype-conversation-between-steven-holl-and-cino-zucchi\/","title":{"rendered":"Grafting – a skype conversation between Steven Holl and Cino Zucchi"},"content":{"rendered":"

View of Cino Zucchi Architetti office \u00a0in Milan – photo by Pietro Savorelli<\/em><\/p>\n

After the three-way conversation – Casamonti, Tamburelli, Zucchi \u2013 Area proposes and participates in a conversation via Skype between Cino Zucchi and Steven Holl, in an attempt to assess the work and projects of Cino Zucchi through observations deriving from two different generational and geographical \u2013 i.e. temporal and spatial – viewpoints, one on the other side of the Atlantic. The objective conditions of this second conversation suggested setting it up along the lines of a dialogue (basically, it is a videocall) of which we offer a few segments. As you scroll them it appears obvious to the reader, however, that what may have started out as a dialogue at some point turns into an interview between the student and the master, although it is Cino Zucchi who seems to interview Steven Holl and not the other way around, as we might expect in a monographic issue about Cino Zucchi. In any case, the answer to this role switch can be found clearly in the next to last question. M.C.<\/p>\n

Cino Zucchi:<\/strong> Ciao Steven, nice to see you even if it is in moving pixels. Where should we start this chat? Am I expected to break the ice with some ponderous theme spelled out in some difficult Latin word?
\nSteven Holl:<\/strong> Why don\u2019t we start by reminiscing about when we first met? I think it was sometime around 1986 for the Porta Vittoria, Triennale Project.
\nCino Zucchi:<\/strong> Yes! I was helping Pierluigi Nicolin with the Milano section of his Triennale exhibition; of course I knew your work before that.
\nI remember when we opened the box and we saw the models of your proposal for Porta Vittoria, we were totally astonished by their beauty and intensity. We really felt your project was changing our perception of the theme and showing a new approach.
\nSteven Holl:<\/strong> I remember you called me on the phone at my New York office; we really worked hard on that project, we decided to use it as a manifesto to change our position about urbanism. In that moment there was a kind of \u201cgrand narrative\u201d going on, the idea that you could only make cities from typology and morphology dominated the whole dialogue.
\nWe tried to make a project without those two ingredients, not starting from given typologies and from a morphology consisting in a plan diagram. We were experimenting on our thesis, but we were nervous because we were showing it in Italy next to many other beautiful things. We made these very tactile models in brass, copper, plaster and steel, it was a big effort. So, when you opened the box and you called us to say \u201cI knew you were good but I didn\u2019t think you were that good, I was very happy.\u201d
\nCino Zucchi:<\/strong> You know I still use your drawing from that project illustrating the process \u201cfrom perspective to plan and not vice versa\u201d in my lecture about a perceptual way
\nto design?
\nSteven Holl:<\/strong> I think that\u2019s a very important approach we share. The experience of space in the city, it\u2019s what we should be striving for. You don\u2019t get this from drawing a plan and extruding it up and then making perspectives; you have to go the other way, you have to compose the space and shape the voids.
\nI was really on your side when you said \u201cwe begin with the voids\u201d. That\u2019s exactly what I think we have to do, we must begin with the common spaces and it\u2019s really difficult to do that because we find ourselves with many prescriptive conditions by the client, often governed by purely economical reasons; I always try to start with the voids as you do in many of your projects.
\nCino Zucchi:<\/strong> You are not just a very good architect, you take time to reason on these matters in a more abstract way: I actually have three of your books on my desk: Questions of Perception, Anchoring and Urbanisms; but many times your projects are so paradigmatic that they serve as examples of method way beyond the specific occasion, like that of the Venice Lido Palazzo del Cinema competition, which is somehow the moral winner.
\nSteven Holl:<\/strong> Thank you, I also liked that project. I didn\u2019t even get a mention out of it and I remember I was making those drawings in dark pencil that took hundreds of hours of labour, I had to work two nights in a row, and that\u2019s why I said to myself \u201cno more of this kind of drawings, they are killing me\u201d.
\nCino Zucchi:<\/strong> I remember at a dinner at my house in a conversation with Antonio Monestiroli who was reminding you about your \u201cEuropean\u201d education or culture and you said: \u201cI was travelling in a train going through a tunnel between USA and Canada, I think I entered the tunnel with a \u2018typological\u2019 mind and I came out of with a \u2018phenomenological\u2019 one.\u201d
\nSteven Holl:<\/strong> Exactly!
\nCino Zucchi:<\/strong> This is a main point I wanted to raise, that of a possible dilemma between two attitudes: one which we could call a \u201cdirect\u201d one toward the observation of a site, the perception of space, the problem in its nudity; and a second one which is aware of not only the problem in its nakedness, but also of the family of solutions layered on it by material and formal cultures; one could say between the act of looking at and measuring a cow and looking at and measuring existing stables. Ernst Gombrich in Art and Illusion demonstrated that when we look at the sky and try to paint a cloud, our \u201cinnocent\u201d representation is never immune from the weight of previous formal conventions. These attitudes can be detected in single authors, as a personal way of doing things, or as collective feelings in time.
\nOften an overly \u201cmannerist\u201d and well-learnt cultural phase (post-modernism and typological studies could be an example) is followed by another one which favours direct observations and spontaneity, as \u201cen plein air\u201d Impressionism followed academic studio painting. But would you feel today we went overboard with the idea of \u201cdirectness\u201d and we have to go back a little bit in acknowledging treasured experience? I\u2019m not talking about architectural history, but more about the idea that architecture as a social practice needs some of conventions or habits; I use the word \u201chabit\u201d as a way our biology consolidates in us a sequential behaviour of acts that once learned becomes unconscious \u2013 like walking, reading or riding a bicycle – and \u201csaves time\u201d, becoming some kind of \u201cshortcut\u201d to achieve our goals. This has also to do with semantics at times: a totally subjective relationship between form and content often risks misunderstanding \u2013 we can\u2019t stand next to our project as a \u201cspeaking dictionary\u201d – and a certain degree of shared conventions is needed in any communication.
\nFinally, there is a didactic problem related to teaching methods, whether to stimulate a direct approach in students or a \u201cstudious\u201d one. I don\u2019t think these two are necessarily contradictory, but what are your feeling about it?
\nSteven Holl:<\/strong> I still teach in Columbia University; I treat my studio as a kind of experimental laboratory because I think the students will get enough practical experience when they go out in the world.
\nWe\u2019re doing a studio called the \u201cArchitectonics of Music\u201d: we make something immaterial like a cube of space that implies and is made according to a particular piece of music, like a piece by Ligeti, Morton Feldman or John Cage. The students have to do a kind of master planning exercise and then design a small building, a school of music with studios, and find the way to connect to their original inspiration according to a piece of music. So really the whole studio is a kind of experimental laboratory, and some very odd things come out of it.
\nIt\u2019s a nice exercise because they\u2019re not relying on the computer, which allows you to draw these big shapes being totally oblivious of context or human scale. I ask them to start to construct physical models; then they can go on using any digital technique they want. I\u2019m excited because there\u2019s some real original work coming out of my studio.
\nCino Zucchi:<\/strong> A funny coincidence came to my mind while you were talking: you had an early Italian artistic education and then went back to the States, while I did the reverse.
\nSteven Holl:<\/strong> Right, back in 1970 in Rome.
\nCino Zucchi:<\/strong> I think I got an experimental attitude from my MIT experience and then I rediscovered Italian scholarly culture, while you seem to have progressively shaken off the \u201cdeductive\u201d and analytical approach that pervaded European architecture in those years which is still somehow present in your very strong proposal for the Les Halles competition. There\u2019s a quotation by Voltaire I like: \u201cI studied all the Fathers of the Church but they will pay for that!\u201d. I agree that in teaching and designing the direct approach is the best, but sometimes I think that we still need some kind of cultural geography not to behave always as \u201cbeginners\u201d. To build urban spaces you need a certain degree of ordinariness; a mere collection of hundreds of \u201csubjective\u201d designs, each based on its own score, a concept will not make a city. In a way, I don\u2019t believe we could imagine a \u201cdeconstructivist\u201d city.
\nDo you feel this problem of relating an individual experience with a collective one?
\nThe younger generation of Italian architects are, by the way, rediscovering the thoughts of Aldo Rossi, Giorgio Grassi in relation to this problem of generating a meaningful shared experience.
\nSteven Holl:<\/strong> I tend to consider this matter project by project. Each project has a certain circumstance that requires a specific response to become part of that culture, of the physical place and its conditions. In Chengdu, we\u2019re just completing a three million square feet intervention consisting of a program of offices, hotels, and apartments;\u00a0but I decided that the entire thing would be made by a very neutral grid representing the structure, which constitute a sort of \u201cbackdrop\u201d texture. Some points needed some accents, and I invited some people like Lebbeus Woods to make a pavilion. I think it\u2019s a project where the texture is shaping the space plus some kind of energy points in different languages.
\nI love many of the early projects by Giorgio Grassi but I disagree completely with his statement of \u201cArchitecture as a Dead Language\u201d (Architettura lingua morta\u201d): I don\u2019t think it\u2019s a dead language at all. In fact, every circumstance gives us the possibility of new words in relation to that condition; like when I worked in Norway north of the Artic Circle to do this little pavilion: it\u2019s in black wood like the stave churches, that\u2019s a language that comes out of the nature of the project and the situation. Same thing on a new project work we\u2019re just opening at Columbia University which is next to a bridge: the language of the building is made by pipes, steel beams and bolts, a language related to the infrastructure, the subway goes right up the building.\u00a0Architecture is not a dead language, I think we must make it alive in every circumstance, each time in a different way.
\nCino Zucchi:<\/strong> Many historical cities are made by some kind of background accompaniment, like a continuous bass line of normal houses, among which suddenly a baroque church stands out as a figure to create a sense of place.
\nSteven Holl:<\/strong> The fabric of the city has to be built up with neutrality, so that certain things have emphasis and others don\u2019t. It\u2019s like a piece of music: silence gives order to the notes, and sometime the more silence the better. Our old master Alvaro Siza knows that lesson very well, he\u2019s a master of making the silent space, and gives energy to the figural space.
\nCino Zucchi:<\/strong> I think what is very interesting about you is that you are in a way well-learnt but you washed away the weight of this erudition, so you\u2019re fresh about things. In Italy there is a proverb saying \u201cImpara l\u2019arte e mettila da parte (learn your art and then put it aside).\u00a0Steven Holl: That\u2019s right, that\u2019s what I tell to my students!
\nCino Zucchi:<\/strong> I think that your spontaneity, your \u201cdirect attitude\u201d is that of a well trained person.
\nSteven Holl:<\/strong> It\u2019s funny that you mentioned that, it\u2019s also the way I approach each project: I try to understand as much as I can about the culture, the site, the circumstances, the program and then I try to put it all aside, forget it all, get up in the morning and make intuitive sketches.
\nCino Zucchi:<\/strong> I\u2019m reading from your book Anchoring: \u201cwriting\u2019s relation to architecture affords only an uncertain mirror to be held up to evidence; it is rather in a wordless silence that we have the best chance to stumble into that zone comprised of space, light and matter that is architecture\u201d.
\nYou wrote many things, and you also have a very sound theoretical thought. The seventies produced a lot of outspoken theories. But I always wondered if the word \u201carchitectural theory\u201d could be turned into \u201carchitectural poetics\u201d without being afraid of that.
\nSteven Holl:<\/strong> I really agree with that.
\nCino Zucchi:<\/strong> But do you feel architecture has all the features of an art? Adolf Loos did not think so. If that\u2019s the case, it\u2019s a very \u201cheavy\u201d one.
\nSteven Holl:<\/strong> With this I disagree. In fact, I\u2019m in Art Forum this month, in a kind of argument between a number of people, and the topic is art and architecture. In the opening sentence I say \u201cthere is no difference; architecture is an art, period.\u201d and I believe that. So, you know, when you\u2019re an artist you also know when to do neutrality, when to do background. I think inside of that statement one can make great city structures too; you\u2019re talking about background fabric and void space, not everything has to be a figural kind of monster, I agree; but I also do believe that architecture is an art and I see the possibility, today more than ever, of very exciting collaborations. I\u2019ve been collaborating with people like Walter Di Maria, Dan Graham, Terry Donovan.
\nCino Zucchi:<\/strong> Architecture is or can be an art; but it also has to protect humans. The \u201cshelter\u201d issue is still there, you cannot go against the question we\u2019re looking for shelter. Especially domestic architecture has a \u201cconsolatory\u201d, gentle side we should not forget.\u00a0Steven Holl: I just finished a house in South Korea and I think that\u2019s really doing everything you\u2019re talking about it. I wrote a little piece on it, and I said it\u2019s a kind of mini Utopia, it\u2019s an inner looking house, in a very dense neighbourhood. The whole project looks inward to a sheet of water and the three pavilions are all the same high and connected below. There was a composition from 1967 by the Hungarian composer Istvan Anhalt called \u201cSymphony of Modules\u201c. It was a piece that was never played; we translated it in an abstract way into space.
\nThe widow of the composer wrote us a letter saying \u201cMy God, I\u2019m so happy, my dead husband\u2019s composition has been turn into a piece of architecture\u201d.
\nCino Zucchi:<\/strong> Operating in such contexts forces us to review our notions of urbanity and of quality in general. You\u2019re working in China now, where the control of detail is probably quite different. We all try to re-adapt to see how the new means of production of what we do are related to our experience. Do you see the condition of the contemporary Eastern city as a place we can employ urban codes learned in school? Rafael Moneo was talking about \u201cthe solitude of buildings\u201d, as the city is not sustaining them any more. Do you feel it as a new condition of freedom or does it give you problems? We also have a lot of technological freedom; any form can be turned almost effortlessly into technology. We have a degree of freedom which is much higher than the artisan\u2019s freedom in the middle of the eighties. We use this freedom but this is also what makes these buildings lonely. Do you feel lonely sometimes?
\nSteven Holl:<\/strong> Often some of the greatest works come out of making something new, that\u2019s directly engaged with something old, like at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City; from the new addition broken down into smaller glass volumes you can have views back to the old 1937 stone building.
\nI wouldn\u2019t do the Nelson-Atkins Museum alone, it\u2019s all about the 1937 stone near classical building and the engagement of that. In the Higgins Hall of the Pratt Institute the change in level between the 1850 building on one side and the 1864 building on the other becomes the main theme of the addition.\u00a0Building in existing contexts, when you can save some pieces and their connections, brings to the new pieces a relationship to the city that I think is necessary.
\nCino Zucchi:<\/strong> Not to take too much of your time what suggestion would you give in the end to your long-standing fan Cino?
\nSteven Holl:<\/strong> You often refer to Walter Benjamin: I was thinking about one text that I really love of his, his reflexion on Naples. I used this word \u201cporosity\u201d, I think you used it too; his is a beautiful text about Naples and porosity and the life of the city moving through and around the buildings. You really can feel this in your urban projects in Venice and Portello in Milano. I think this Casa Rustici by Terragni in Milano is also about porosity in a way. But also his ramp-stair in Villa Bianca, I could never get that out of my mind. I think I\u2019ve employed that stairs a number of times, it moves in a amazing way. On one level my book \u201cAnchoring\u201d shows an attempt to start in a fresh way, but in another way I\u2019m nostalgic of the pure words of an architect like Terragni.
\nCino Zucchi:<\/strong> Next time you come to Milan, maybe for the furniture fair next April, I will take you around on the back of my Vespa to see some more \u201cperverted\u201d Milanese architecture of the post WWII reconstruction. Milan was heavily bombed during the war; the reconstruction of the center was done in a peculiar fashion, with what we could call a kind of \u201ccompromised\u201d modernism; in 1959 Reyner Banham wrote an article called \u201cThe Italian Retreat from Modern Architecture\u201d, and Ernesto Rogers answered with one called \u201cRisposta al custode dei Frigidaires\u201d (Reply to the Guardian of the Fridges): what at that time was seen as a negative departure for the hard-core functionalistic we see today as an interesting mediation between the inner reasons of typology and the need to consolidate the existing morphology of the city. The casa Rustici by Terragni you just quoted is a prime example of this \u201cdouble strategy\u201d: the flying balconies along the street side unify the free bodies of the apartments and re-establish the continuity of the street.
\nI think that the most interesting part of Milano\u2019s reconstruction is a fruitful dialectic between the pureness of buildings trying to access sun and light, and this acceptance of the layered character of the city. It\u2019s not a linguistic adaption, it is more like a deformation, which I find also in your work.\u00a0Thanks for the chat Steve, I\u2019ll let you go back to your work.
\nSteven Holl:<\/strong> Ciao Cino, see you soon in New York or Milan!<\/p>\n