STUDIO ALBORI

 Flavien Menu . Your office Studio Albori recently "finished" a Pavilion at the Biennale, alongside with Alvaro Siza that you called master. I was very surprised, looking at your practice, that you called him Master ?  

Giacomo Borella. I call him master first of all literally translating from Italian maestro: he who teaches to a pupil. I was a pupil of his, having chosen him to be my maestro “when I was cheerful and young” (quoting another Portuguese-speaking poet, Caetano Veloso), going to work as an intern in his office in 1987. I think I learnt more in those three short months than in the whole five years of my university course.


FM. Honestly, there is a world separating your interventions, and maybe the only link to it is the fact that your worked at Alvaro. What happened during 36 years to create such gap between your first attempt as an intern and this Venice Pavilion ?

Giacomo Borella. Well, basically it happened that we grew up… Of course there is a certain distance, there are many biographical, historical, objective reasons: Siza was born in ’33, we in the Sixties. When in the Eighties the ecological crisis became evident – I remember the Chernobyl disaster, in ’86, as a kind of watershed – our sentimental and professional education was still very much in progress. We were in our twenties and it is quite natural that we were more ready to absorb this new condition within our perspective. But then it took a long time of sedimentation and questioning to begin to understand the implication that all this could have on architecture. In a quite confused way, without being very aware, we found ourselves slowly calling into question the myths on which the architecture that we were taught was more or less still founded: progress, development, modernity and so on. We weren’t satisfied with the critique to modernity that was carried on by the Milanese school of Rossi, Grassi etc… (but here I speak for myself, because for example Francesca studied with Grassi, and still has great admiration for him). Their critique ended up being a kind of “rappel à l'ordre”, a call to return to the certainty of historical, classical, monumental forms. At the time it was not at all well-defined to me, but I think that what made me fall in love with Siza was that he didn’t try to conceal the uncertainty of his architecture. He had written something like “paths are never clear”. And, above all, within this uncertainty, there was a kind of touching kindness towards the reality, the places, no matter how wrecked they were. There is this sketch for Evora which portrays fields, paths, ruins, recent housing tenements, people walking, etc…  under the arch of a line (perhaps a desiccated celestial vault) and the words: “incluir tudo” (include everything). I found in his gaze an enormous amount of attention, a non-discriminatory – I would say fraternal - attitude, an almost Buddhist sense of coexistence…

FM.  And this attitude seems to be still in your practice?

GB. I hope so… In some way we found ourselves trying to extend this concern about coexistence to include relations with the biosphere. Not from an abstract perspective, but through a very practical approach, because we never had the time to do what is normally called “research”. So we tried more and more to introduce in our ordinary projects, with ordinary clients and budgets, practical questions about use of resources, consumption, energy, technology and their relations with the environment. This led us to question modern axioms and techniques, like the monopoly of reinforced concrete or polystyrene, and to experiment many alternatives: timber construction, straw bales, reuse of components, and so on.

FM.  it's interesting to see the pictures of this pavilion in Venice because you have Alvaro Siza works. Which allows you to walk like it's neat and finished. And then there is your work, which is very open and unfinished, DIY. It's an interesting neighboring but it's also very interesting that you really assume the fact that it's unfinished, clumsy, awkward, composed with reclaiming materials,.. and they are like also chicken walking around (laughs). Everything is living and that's part of your architectural expression. It’s so crumbling !

GB. It’s funny that you use this term, “crumbling”, about our work for the Vatican pavilion. Because Josè Tolentino, the cardinal that was the commissioner of the pavilion, who is also a great poet and theologian, writes a daily column on the front page of an Italian newspaper which is titled “The Gospel of crumbs”. During the project we were deeply inspired by him and maybe this coincidence is not completely fortuitous.

The fact of having a form that is a bit uncertain, open, out of order sometimes and not so “iconic” – this horrible word! - or recognizable, is very much part of our practice. To limit the form to its visual dimension can be very reductive. Form can be something else. For example, it can be a strong tool of relation with the environment, not only in a metaphorical sense. You can do a project that, through the form, interacts physically with the sun, with the climate. It can enhance or reduce the temperature. We are more interested in this kind of form. But climate is always also micro-climate of a specific place, with its particular and unrepeatable conditions, so it is never about doing an abstract operation dealing only with latitude and altitude. And this is exactly the case of the house in Vens.

FM. Yes I know, we went there a couple of times. The first time it was so foggy that we couldn't see the house basically. Yesterday when we arrived, we discovered that the house was extremely present, reflecting the sun until it’s last moment. The open facade with all the windows was clearly capturing the energy from the sun, and Paolo, the owner of the house was lounging on the sun. We did a tour of the house and every side of the house has a different color. It's still the same timber but its colors change from red to black, depending on the orientation towards the sun and the wind.

GM. The exposition of the sun and the way to place the building towards it was the first thing we thought about when we started the design. There were planning rules that were strict and defined the distance from the neighbors, so the buildable possibilities were not so big, but in the meantime we had options and finally decided to go for a compact but tall building (three levels) in order to catch the maximum solar energy on the south façade, which also allowed us to have all the rooms south facing, with a view of the mountain and the valley. This permitted the natural heating of the house, that otherwise would have been supplied by mechanical systems. So the form of the house, its implementation and height are directly related to the idea of capturing solar energy, the idea of having a house that had almost no needs in terms of adding external energy. And in fact, there is only a small kitchen stove. But the most important thing is to remember that it is placed at 1800 meters of altitude. A house like this in another place, for example in the climate of Milan, would be an uninhabitable oven.

FM. Paolo explained that to us. The solar panel and the solar façade are producing enough energy for the heating of the house and the water. This was indeed benefiting a price from the region highly innovative, especially in high mountain context.

GM. Yes and especially in this context of the Aosta Valley which is very strict in terms of building regulations and where there prevails a very questionable interpretation of “tradition”. The house was called “la casa strana” (the strange house) by a local newspaper, but for us it is much more similar in spirit to the anonymous pre-modern architecture of the place than all the pseudo-traditional pastiche that is encouraged by local authorities and commissions. 

FM. Yes, we walked in Vens, and strangely, you recognized many architectural features that you used in your design.

GB. I’m not surprised. For a very long time that we have been looking at anonymous pre-modern constructions as an inexhaustible source of inspiration and learning, much more than contemporary architecture. I wouldn’t speak of “traditional architecture”, that is an ambiguous definition that tends to reduce the complexity to a single stylistic identity – when instead in every place you can find many different traditions and infinite hybridization. I prefer the definition of “minor architecture”, which for ages was what constituted the majority of human habitat. The notion of “minor architecture” is also important because today almost everybody wants to do “major architecture”, and the outcome is the unhuman landscape that we can see. All we have made is simply an attempt at contemporary minor architecture.

FM. Paolo also told me you can not buy a plot if you’re not local from the Aosta Valley. I can imagine that you were also “forced” to collaborate with a local carpenter. How was the relationship with the builders but also the local community ?

GB. Mmm… from what I remember, nobody forced us to call local companies or craftsmen. We employed a local carpenter because there was one near there that was very good and reliable, and so it was the most sensible thing to do. However, it was compulsory to realise the roof in slabs of stone. But what happens is that the granite that is used for the roofs in the Aosta Valley in recent times usually comes from Norway or China. It is quite paradoxical within this frame of supposed protection of local identity, and very typical of globalization. So it was our choice to struggle until we found a small amount of local granite. The same thing happened for the timber. Normally the larch wood that is used in the Aosta Valley, as in most parts of Europe, comes from Austria. We searched until we found local larch.

This was only for an elemental ecological reason, to try to promote local production and use materials that incorporate the minimum of gray energy.

Relations with the local building authority weren’t that easy. They rejected many solutions that we proposed. For instance, originally there was an external flight of stairs that from the upper level reached the roof, ending with a small balcony. It was designed to allow removal of snow from the photovoltaic panels, and also to provide a little place to watch the sunset. They rejected it saying that external staircases are not typical of local architecture. But I can show you a couple of dozen beautiful and particularly ingenious external staircases within a radius of a hundred meters from the house. I could give you many anecdotes. They entered very much in the details about the roof solution: the south pitch, covered with photovoltaic, juts out from the house toward East, while the north pitch originally didn’t. It seems that this discontinuity in the shape of the roof put them in a sort of panic, so they promulgated an official injunction to rectify it. We could only accept. This part of the roof is quite messy and we always try to cut it out from the pictures.

FM. In a broader terms, your relationship with craftsmanship, DIY, gesture and the doing by making seems to be very much part of your practice : sometimes you're engraving render finish with wooden fork on the external plaster, sometime you're using branches as balcony,.. All of this create a poetry of material and ready-made composition. When I arrived in your office, you show me very quickly the workshop as it seems an important part of your work.

GB. I would like to include even more elements hand-made by ourselves in our projects, but it always depends very much on the different situations. The projects commissioned for exhibitions, like the Venice Biennale Pavilion, are the ones where it is possible to try to maximize our manual work, because the intensity of the regulations is a bit less suffocating. So they are also occasions to break the alienation of office work and to try things out. But almost always we try to do some manual interventions in the process of construction of our projects. Sometimes it succeeds, sometimes not.

It comes of course from the observation of minor, humble, forgotten architectures. You see a little flower painted on a lintel over a window, or some waves engraved in the plaster: they weren’t made by a proper artist and are not masterpieces, you may even not notice them, but you feel a certain mysterious cordiality…

You know, contemporary architecture usually seems to aim to conceal the fact that it is made by human beings. It seems that it wants to appear as produced directly by the megamachine. It is more or less what Günter Anders called “promethean shame”, the shame for not being as perfect as machines.

FM. It’s striking to imagine how modernity, machinery and bureaucracy have placed a distance with the craft, the gesture and the hands. Modernity can appears like a big lie, as Bruno Latour would call, we’ve never been Modern.

GB. Yes, it is something that has been with me for a long time now. It began in some way as a legacy of Alvaro Siza. Paradoxical, isn’t it? Of course he is still a figure of the “modern project”, but his philosophy of inclusion, his attitude of deep listening of places, his delicacy toward natural elements, all of this contains seeds of a critique to modernity. In some completely different way, the same could be said for our other master, Umberto Riva. It is funny how, many years later, in contemporary architecture there is so little critique of modernity, if not in very superficial ways: very few serious critiques in terms of use of technology, automation, growth, ways of living, alienation in work, etc... Instead, there is only a lot of superficial greenwashing. But it’s impossible to face the problems of our time using the same tools that caused them. This is leading us to disaster.

FM. What was the trigger for your critique of modernity?

GB. As I said before, there were many, and it was a long process that is still going on. For me, the figure of Ivan Illich was certainly crucial. I started to read him at the end of the Nineties, when he was still alive, a bit forgotten in comparison to the large resonance he had in the Seventies. It really started to question everything from the roots. To read his critique of modern myths - development, education, transportation, medicine, industrialization, housing – was mind-blowing. Some of his writings crossed more directly the fields of architecture, urban planning or energy, like the pamphlet “H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness”, the book “Energy and Equity”, or the essay “Dwelling”. To meet his thought wasn’t really a comfortable experience: he really detested architects! Anyway, I think he produced a deep influence on our work.

FM. How the Vatican reacted to your intervention, because as we said in the first part of the interview, it’s quite unfinished, raw, with chicken running around in total contrast with Alvaro Siza intervention.

GB. When Josè Tolentino, who as I said was the commissioner of the pavilion, arrived on the island of San Giorgio the day before the opening, we were quite worried. We had had a few very inspiring meetings with him, where he had invited us to do a frugal and unintrusive intervention, something where architecture would “take a step backwards”. And he followed and shared from a distance all the process of project and realization. But at the end, with all those worn-out materials, vegetable plants still so young and shy, paths paved with straw, chickens pecking around, we were a bit afraid of having gone too far: it was still the Vatican pavilion! So we were walking with him in the garden, he was looking around… We asked “Josè, we hope that is not too ramshackle and poor!”. He replied smiling “Poorness is a big ally!” A couple of months later I brought him a copy of the book by Illich that I edited and translated. He said: “You don’t know that I have a true passion for him”. We had many moments like that.