Bild: c Guido Stazzoni
webpage Cino Zucchi Architetti
Der renommierte italienische Architekt Cino Zucchi besucht uns aus Mailand und spricht (auf Englisch) über die von Ihm verfasste „The Camping Shower Theory“; Architecture should adapt and endure, like a city, not a disposable product. Zucchi advocates for a „just-out-of-time“ architecture that values context, history, and long-term impact over fleeting trends.
CV Cino Zucchi
Born in Milano in 1955, Cino Zucchi earned a B.S.A.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Laurea in Architettura at the Politecnico di Milano, where he. He is currently Chair Professor of Architectural and Urban Design at the Politecnico di Milano. He has taught in many international design workshops and has been “John T. Dunlop Visiting Professor in Housing and Urbanization” at the Graduate School of Design of Harvard University. Author of several articles and books on architectural history and theory, he participated to various editions of the Milano Triennale and of the Venice Biennale of Architecture: the installation “Copycat” won an honorary mention in the 2012 edition, and he was the curator of the Italian Pavilion in the 2014 edition. He has been the president of the Jury of the Mies van der Rohe Award 2015, and he is member of the international research team ARE_Living on housing innovation.
Cino Zucchi
The Camping Shower Theory
In praise of a just-out-of-time architecture
Abstract
In its explicit rejection of previous formal experiences, Modernism has tried to describe the design process as an "abstract" scientific method through which the program, budget and climatic conditions inputs would be transformed directly into the output of the final form.
A contemporary revision of this model should implement more complex behaviours through the introduction of two further parameters: the first is the concept of 'retroaction', where the output modifies and regulates the input through a feedback mechanism; the second is the awareness of the necessary delay between the moment in which a functional need is expressed and that in which the object or building designed give it a response.
When we try to regulate the temperature of a shower in a campsite, the result of our action is not immediate because the water takes a certain time to flow through the tubes; while waiting, we tend to exaggerate the ‘oversteering’ input on the hot tap, we burn ourselves, we exaggerate on the cold tap, we freeze, in a process of successive corrections converging towards a comfortable temperature.
The existence of this 'time delay' influences architecture in different ways: a building always responds to the question that triggered its design in a slightly 'out of time' way; but it also lasts far beyond the moment when the need that generated it ceases or changes.
If we apply all this to the urban scale, we clearly see the deep difference between a city and a technical device like a smartphone; we cannot throw away the first one as we do with the latter. If a city were only the result of a well-designed algorithm whose inputs are the current needs, each generation should completely destroy the obsolete urban structure and build from scratch a new one adapted to the needs, lifestyles and technical progress of the present. This view, which for decades has founded the 'functionalist' urbanism of expanding metropolises, denies the ability to adapt - or, to use a fashionable word, the 'resilience' - of architectural and urban forms and the concrete mechanisms of their evolution.
The overall shape of the city survives its inhabitants; life adapts to spaces that in turn adapt to life, and the form is often what welcomes and represents the social contract between people.
Even if the urban environment is the work of man, it is perceived by us as a ‘second nature’. We feel its spaces as capable of accepting both the individual and the collective dimensions in a natural way. Our intuitive sense of ‘urbanity’ contains the notions of time and society. Against the abstract concept of 'method', which would like to start from scratch every time, what we now call 'material culture' shows the dynamism of the process of exchange and continuous mutation that shapes it, forcing us to reflect on obsolete terms such as 'costume', 'habit', 'way of doing'. The opposition between industrial processes and craft traditions, between experience and innovation, finds today new forms of integration capable of weaving together shared knowledge and individual experimentation.
The design reflection on these issues has in the past produced different strategies. In CZA’s work practice, we never respond to problems with a standard solution, but we evaluate case by case the most effective way to deal with a specific site, a specific program, a specific cultural context, without neglecting the time-tested tools of the our discipline. Just like Stanley Kubrick goes from Spartacus to Lolita, from 2001 A Space Odyssey to A Clockwork Orange, from Barry Lyndon to Shining, and all the songs from the Beatles’ Double White Album has widely different melodies and arrangements, so in our work we consider the question of architectural language something to deal with and somehow reinvent every time.
In a way somehow opposed to that advocated by the first modern with its prototypes reproducible in every part of the world, the Italian experience after World War II - from the Treasury of San Lorenzo in Genova by Franco Albini to the Casa Borsalino in Alessandria by Ignazio Gardella - teaches us the wonder of how a general thought can generate different flowers, strongly rooted in a specific context however without any imitative attitude. Contemporary lifestyles, new urban forms, the evolution of mechanical and computer technologies need new inventions, new spaces. Nevertheless, these spaces must also know how to graft themselves onto the living body of a city that, while changing every day, remains over time as the beloved background of our life.
In a world obsessed with a 'just-in-time' attitude, to think about a 'just-out-of-time' architecture also means reflecting on the concepts of long duration, on the plasticity of existing environments, on the regeneration of cities, on reuse, on the life cycles of the artefacts: a 'new ecology' capable of integrating the urban environment and the natural one, where technical innovation is not a formal fetish, but a responsible action tool in an increasingly smaller and fragile planet.