Interview by Claudia Donà

Along the border is the title that Luca Scacchetti, Milanese architect and designer, had chosen for the introductory text to the book on the first fourteen years of his architecture, the first important book published by Idea Books in 1990. Luca was 38 years old at the time, he was a young architect aware of working in a perennial “fragile equilibrium between pure form and built form“, between “the daily reality of building and the architecture conceived, dreamed and idealized. “Between profession and theory, between profession and research “.

Luca passed away in July 2015, aged 63. After those first architectures he had made many others, in Italy and in the world – hotels, villas, industrial buildings, installations – together with several incursions into design, urban planning, interior furnishing, and the constant practice of teaching at universities and design schools that he had never forsaken. Meanwhile he had met Cinzia Anguissola, also an architect, then later mother of his sons Leone and Ludovico, and his life and work partner. Cinzia, beautiful, outgoing, impetuous, a little magical; Luca, also beautiful, charming, refined, elegant … It was a dazzling encounter, an enchantment that only sometimes (and only to someone) happens in life. Today Cinzia leads the Scacchetti Associati Architecture Studio in Milan.

This interview is therefore in turn a conversation “along the border“, hanging on a thin line ridge, difficult not to fall on one side or the other.

It is Cinzia who speaks in the interview, but the words come from Cinzia and Luca together, sometimes more Cinzia, sometimes more Luca. The two-voice story interprets beautifully a very current project philosophy- in particular today – based on a practice of making architecture that never shouts, is cultured and wise, which firmly believes in the value of the built work, in the ancient craft of the “bottega”. Architecture that is found in the evocative force of the material, in the identity and spirit of the place, and emanates a timeless modernity: a harmonious synthesis between classicism and innovation, that is always balanced, and yet capable of accommodating the unexpected that arises from reality, from sedimentation and stratification. An architecture that evolves from the action added by those who inhabit it.

Among the many things said and written about the works of Luca Scacchetti I choose the words of Paolo Portoghesi: “an architect committed to giving body and blood to the things thought“, who was able to “combine laconicity, fidelity to a universe of few elementary forms, clearly definable, what the treatise writers of the sixteenth century called grace”.

Claudia Donà: You told me, Cinzia, that you hadn’t reread this text by Luca since the book was published. Why?

Cinzia Anguissola Scacchetti:  We had just fallen madly in love and I, driven by passion, had read and corrected the proofs so many times that when the book came out I didn’t read it again. I did it now, on the occasion of this interview. Starting right from here, casually, makes me very happy. In this writing, Along the border, Luca expresses the first subtle divergence of thought away his great Maestro, Aldo Rossi, and he does so by affirming the need for dialogue with the territory, with the place (the locus), but also the autonomy of the construction site, which requires the architect to make real choices and not just strictly theoretical ones. Luca had suffered greatly from this breakup, until about three months before Rossi’s death in 1997, it happened they met at the airport. Traveling to Rome together Luca understood that the Maestro, despite his estrangement, had always followed his work with admiration, without saying anything to him. He was delighted. Those two hours spent together were an imprimatur for Luca; if you had an important Maestro you need him to tell you bravo!

CD: In the same writing he claims that he has always felt isolated, without allies.

CAS: Yes, isolated from the “rossiani“, which was the group of architects we frequented at the time. Luca was used to say: “they are dear friends but moralists in architecture, to me it is more interesting the context, the construction site, the reality”. These were choices that went beyond pure theory.

CD: When you met Luca, what attracted and struck you the most, the man or the architect?

CAS: The man, absolutely! The first time we went out together he came to fetch me with a gigantic bouquet of violets, so beautiful that my daughter Augusta made a drawing which she titled “Mum with Luca’s flowers”.

CD: Of course: beautiful, elegant, cultivated, refined and not at all arrogant or opinionated.

CAS: Yes, a young man but with a strong presence, charming and generous. When I asked him what he had done as an architect, he told me about the building in Corso Garibaldi in Milan, without telling me where it was. At the time I lived very close and I went to look for this building but I did not recognize it so much it was so well integrated into the context. First the man himself attracted me, and then was his amazing ability to communicate with words. He was extraordinary, his lectures were exciting, in a few minutes he was able to capture people’s interest. When he finished he always had a queue of people following him, like a rock star. I also immediately liked his obsession with making, he was always designing.

C.D: Luca said he had spiritual teachers such as Filarete, Leon Battista Alberti, Bramante, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, Adolf Loos, and traveling companions, like Rossi himself or John Hejduk. Who else?

C.A.S: Adalberto Libera: he often quoted his thoughts and remembered him with esteem and much affection. Guglielmo Ulrich, both for the furnishings and for the architecture: he did not have the chance to meet him, but he became a close friend of his son Giancorrado and in 2009 he edited the book on Ulrich’s complete work. Paolo Soleri, apparently distant but much loved for his research on materials, combinations and his completely personal drive to design. Luca understood and hopelessly admired César Manrique, architect and artist, discovered by chance on a business trip to Lanzarote. So much so that he wanted me to make a big wall inside the Risorgimento Hotel in Lecce, a large bas-relief in local stone, a sort of affectionate reference to Manrique’s material and abstract approach. He wanted to write a book about him.

C.D: He was also very interested in the work of the Slovenian Jože Plečnik, a great pupil of Otto Wagner, dismissed for a long time and then finally re-evaluated.

C.A.S: Very much, from Venice we left with the children for Ljubljana to see Plečnik’s work, we visited everthing including the cemetery… and it was already nightfall. In Athens we were fascinated by Dimitris Pikionis, the flooring of our studio is in fact inspired by the composition of his paths of the ascent to the Parthenon.

C.D: It is a strange and intriguing mosaic of references and dialogues, from the Renaissance to the Milanese Novecento style of the 1920-1930s, to Neoclassicism in Italy and abroad, to Rationalism and Modern architecture, to Postmodernism, up to include the admiration for Plečnik, the utopia of Soleri or the multifaceted personality of Manrique. A coherent continuity but with unexpected and surprising lateral flashes. In that text, Luca wrote: “I believe that one of the characteristics of contemporary architecture is in showing itself and being in fragments.” And further on: “my architecture is made up of a few elements that are always repeated”, a synthetic language “like a telegram”. He believed in the rules but also in the breaking of those same rules, in order and in the inevitable appearance of disorder, in the pieces of the puzzle but in the impossibility of assembling them except as “dissolved and incoherent parts“.

C.A.S: Indeed. Do you know the Cathedral of Prato? It is a typical building of that era, around the year 1000, it is that kind of architecture that drives Luca and me crazy, with those superimpositions of subsequent eras that arise out of necessity. That Cathedral has this Michelozzo’s pulpit decorated by Donatello in the fifteenth century, which emerges from the corner and seems to break the symmetry, instead it maintains it, strengthens it. It is precisely the exception that proves the rule.

C.D: Luca and urban planning?

C.A.S: He was passionate about urban planning, I am not referring to viaducts, streets or squares but to designing guidelines. Here I must refer to another of his elective affinities, Fernand Pouillon.

We took a trip to the north of Corsica to see his works. This French architect, also forgotten, even reneged and then belatedly rediscovered, had made urban plans for the south of France and Northern Algeria and a lot of architecture for large building complexes. He had managed to link all the architecture of his time simply by giving diktats, rules. It was Luca’s dream, who said “I would like to enter a Ministry where I can manage all the components without having to deal with architecture.” This is what he then did with the urban recovery plan for Caserta and its surroundings, a ten-year assignment (started in 1998), all built up by elements, for indications aimed at giving coherence to a territory crossed by the countryside. An almost algebraic project:  now it seems normal to do urban plans like Lego but then it was not usual.

C.D: The love for drawing, art, literature, music, cinema, where did it come from?

C.A.S: From his mother who belonged to a family of generations of artists, the Todeschini, originally from Valsassina. In the Todeschini house you could breathe art in a broad sense: as a girl her mother was a costume designer, her father was a painter, like her grandfather, her uncle a sculptor. Luca was very attached to this maternal imprinting also because his father – a different but in turn singular character – was often away for business.

C.D: Did you start at once working with him?

C.A.S: No, at the beginning we collaborated in a discontinuous way, except on competitions; since 1990 we did all of them together. Then some furnishings that Luca years later added to one of his most beautiful creations, a winery in Puglia. We really started working together in the 2000s, on villas, design and all projects in China.

C.D: Did you immediately find yourself in Luca’s approach to the project?

C.A.S:  No, I have to say this honestly, especially in the interior design. All these tiny windows, which give a rhythm on the outside, don’t help you feel part of a city from the inside. In our house the windows on the lower floor are cross-shaped and I had told him: “Luca, they are beautiful from the outside but a nightmare from inside”. Our understanding on design has developed in the relationship with the place, with the territory. When I was drawing the plans I would say: “Look Luca, I’m here and I’d like to see outside!”. Over time, without disagreements, we both began to change our minds and we taught each other.

C.D: Why was interior design less interesting to Luca?

C.A.S: Luca’s great passion was the relationship between architecture and the city, much more than that with the interior space. When he saw my projects he was always surprised that I was able to pull out of all that space, for him what counted was the symmetry, the same relationship that existed on the facade was found in the plans. That’s why he was very good on hotels, his territory was the big space.

C.D: Symmetries, relationships, repetitions, order, measure: the rules of classical architecture, rather the quintessence of the classic.

C.A.S: The quintessence of the temple! The temple must have all the elements necessary to be recognized as “that place“. So whether it’s a hotel, a house or something else, the facade must have all the elements that make it recognizable. It has always been like this for Luca.

C.D: You said about the temple, how do you explain what he wrote about understanding how much wonder and beauty there is in the “ugly“?

C.A.S: With one city: Athens! We both said to each other: we don’t talk about the Parthenon but about the marvelous disaster of that city, which is still there. It is life, it is vital chaos. Luca designed rationally but was absolutely aware of the transformations induced by reality, indeed he loved them. Another example is Pujiang, in China: he had designed a model district in a gigantic territory, after three years the facades of the buildings were filled with trappings and accoutrements: who had made the veranda, who added the terrace, who had put the air conditioner in, but all this confirmed the correctness of the project, it did not distort it. It had simply become alive. Luca was happy about it. It’s what we called “the cleanliness of the beginning and the dirt of the end“.

C.D: Luca has been defined by some as an “eclectic”. What do you think about it?

C.A.S: It is an opinion that hurt both of us, eclecticism is derived from other assumptions. The themes of Luca’s architecture are the resources of the place, both formal and cultural, and what happens is that the project takes on different aspects and results, but if you put them all close together, you find the common thread. Luca used to say that a project has a mother and a father, is the son of a motherhood and a fatherhood. The mother is the earth, the father is the designer, the project is what arises from this meeting. But then the son walks with his legs, he is not a simple copy, there is something more: the poetics and culture of the territory and the poetics of those who intervene. You can see this very well in Italy: the buildings made in Milan have Lombard characters, those made in Puglia are all elaborated on the play of light and on the stone of Lecce. They are obviously different projects, but the approach is the same. It is not eclecticism.

C.D: If we take the building in Viale Majno or the one in Viale Padova in Milan, they are architectures where in the uniqueness of those projects there is sedimentation, the reproduced stratification of the history of the city, elements that are at the base of the Neoclassical and then become rationalist and more abstract.

C.A.S: It is undeniable that this culture of sedimentation has nothing to do with parametric architecture, I am thinking for example of Zaha Hadid whose forms continue to be reproduced and reused. Luca instead wanted to reproduce the urban fragments in the single building because one is part of the whole. It is a design that wins over computational and parametric architecture, it is the affirmation of human intelligence over the artificial, it is interpretation and bond with the place, with the memory of the city. It is never indifference.

C.D: So the place is a resource, where you can find the soul of the project.

C.A.S: Yes, let’s go back to China: when we went to see the site, in Punjang, we found an endless land, there was nothing, but a new, huge city should have been built there. The competition was then won by Vittorio Gregotti but we did a part of it. It was very difficult to start with a design idea because there was no reference: a step, an edge, a ladder, nothing close, no comparison, nothing. There was no “place”! It was an incredible mental building effort. Luca’s projects are placed in different contexts, but with the aspiration to make them seem to have always been there because of the choice of materials, of formal elements, the play of solids and voids.

C.D: The place is a relationship and dialogue with history but also with the surroundings of the site.

C.A.S: Think of the building in via Buonarroti in Milan, it is a declaration made to his city to say “I design like this“. On the left it dialogues with Boito’s nineteenth-century brick building, on the right with the rationalist buildings made after the war bombing. In the middle the transparency of the glass. It is a jewel, understood by few at the beginning but now more and more.

C.D: What did Luca think of “archistar” designers, such as Gehry, Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid or others?

C.A.S: He did not love them, too much “ego”. However, he liked the Prada Foundation by Koolhaas, for the use of materials, those inclined, metaphysical, dechirichian planes. We have always loved the works of even unknown architects, especially those from Eastern Europe, where you can’t even understand who made them. Institutional buildings but with extraordinary inventions, local yes but with something more, the result of research, of giving space to the ornament intended as a detail, not as a decoration. It is the sum of the details that makes a good architecture with which you can dialogue because it resonates with you.

C.D: It becomes “narrative architecture” as Luca wrote, not “descriptive“, that is only capable of describing itself. “The description is certainly a scientific attitude, the narrative is not. The latter freely adds and removes data according to the personal choices and passions of the narrator. “

C.A.S: Yes, there is also another aspect: when the narration takes place in accordance with the person who makes it, that is the craftsman, millions of other stories are created: how much you have transmitted to him, how close you have been to him, how much he has given to you.

C.D: An architecture by Luca that he considered emblematic or symbolic of this narration?

C.A.S: Perhaps the villas, here he had customers who appreciated him in all his aspects, gave him a free hand even in the interiors and therefore he felt authorized to play like a child. Not only the project of the structure, therefore the relationship with the elements of the territory, but also the content, the spatial division, from the fixed works that transform the interior into an urban street, to the furnishings, the handles or the design of the tiles, like when for a bathroom he drew a series of invented fish and had them made in inlay by a craftsman. In the villas he designed everything, he interfaced with those who would have lived in the architecture, not with the city. He did a free narrative.

C.D: Luca and nature?

C.A.S: If there was no architecture he was not interested, except in India, where the synergy of architecture and nature is wonderful. Among his latest works there are some sculptures, small aedicules made for a ceramic factory in Liguria. Seven imaginary cities and all cities of work: that of factories, chimneys, buildings, all cities where you do something.

C.D: His relationship with irony?

C.A.S: Very ironic and also capable of not taking himself too seriously.

C.D: Together you have traveled in many different countries, for pleasure and for work. Is there a place where you both left your heart?

C.A.S: Maybe everywhere! We both had big eyes, the desire to know and embrace everything, an immeasurable curiosity to collect every solicitation, to breathe the place. We used to walk for hours, I was noticing some things, Luca others, then together we made beautiful collages.

C.D: Tell me about his design. Certain objects – armchairs, sofas, tables, bookcases – seem to have always been there, they are almost classics.

C.A.S: Luca was an artist and also a very balanced man, careful and meticulous in his innate choice and combination of materials, in his attention to detail, with the result being a great balance between forms and materials. His pieces are classic-modern. For each company he studied the history and the identity, he would never plant a seed destined not to blossom. He was also a great researcher, he rediscovered and relaunched many forgotten materials, essences, marbles, finishes. He loved design, not luxury.

C.D: Luca in Milan taught at the IED – European Institute of Design – at the Brera Academy, at the Polytechnic. Did he like teaching?

C.A.S: Very much, he loved having young people around, even in the studio, and they loved him.

C.D: The relationship with the notion of progress?

C.A.S: I answer with a reflection extrapolated from a research done on the use of degradable or natural materials. “Degradable materials” said Luca, “do not interest me at all because my architecture must remain standing forever“. But he believed in progress because he believed in the future.

C.D: What did he think of utopia?

C.A.S: Well he loved utopia because it made him imagine so many different futures.

C.D: When did he manage to find the time to make drawings, sketches or paintings?

C.A.S: Always. In the studio he had his color room, yellow, and he used to sit there, often even in the evening, after dinner. The watercolor, or rather the ecoline, was also a system of presentation of the project: whether it was architecture or design, we always started with a watercolor by Luca. If he had to change his life as the only other choice he would have been an artist, a pure artist.

C.D: How would you define Luca’s contemporaneity?

C.A.S: I am not a theorist, so I have to think about a project and I would say the headquarters of the Budri marble company in Mirandola. The façade is entirely in Luserna stone cut with the hollow split technique to preserve the original surface appearance; it is not a covering, they are large slabs that are self -supporting. From the outside you can only see the stone, you can’t even perceive the window frames, then you see this roof that comes out with all its little forks, while next to another part of the building is dominated by glass. For me this project, which is one of the latest, is really very modern for how modern Luca knew how to be. He did not start from a future that is forward but from a past that he threw towards the future. When he dreamed of making towers or skyscrapers and sketched them, seeing them did not make us think about the future, they were not as disruptive as torpedoes that depart towards space. Yes, there was his lightness but you should have seen them finished because surely in the path of the choice of materials, of the joints, of the counter-façades, who knows what they would have become. Luca was used to design an image in his head that then he built hand by hand, like a collection of stamps, taking everything that existed of contemporary and then mounting it as he pleased. His contemporaneity lies in the use and summation of materials and details, together with a lot of research because one project is never the same as another.

C.D: Did he also experiment doing research?

C.A.S: Absolutely yes. In one installation he used a special textile material to create an all-white room and amazed everyone. Nobody understood where the light came from, where you could sit, it was an enveloping limbo. The material was available on the market but no one knew how to use it, he did it in the most unexpected way, and although the initial sketch did not say anything, the result was surprising.

C.D: Let’s go back to the works in China for a moment: have they changed you both?

C.A.S: Perhaps the architects of Luca’s generation would never admit it, but the relationship with countries such as China or the former Soviet Republics, which have enormous economic and development opportunities, has changed the minds of designers and ours as well. In Italy or in Europe, the design of a building after five years was still on paper, while there it was already built, inhabited, transformed. The extraordinary speed, first of all, and then the possibility of opening up to a much wider design, not really urban but almost. Many years ago we entered the competition for an ideal city in China. Luca’s drawing was beautiful, the city was made up entirely of circles, of spheres that created holes or became caps, piazzas, it was all curved and very sinuous. A project of absolute modernity, a vision of the future, which arises precisely from saying “maybe I will see it, I will see this new city”.

C.D: Has your notion of place and territory changed over the years?

C.A.S: It has evolved, thanks to the experience in other countries, like the vastness of China or the problematic nature of Moldova, where in Chisinau we designed a hotel. Moldova is a plundered country, it no longer has anything of its own, the only trace of identity and memory that we were able to find were some decorations on fabrics. On this single fragment we built the facade, with those cuts and small drawings. If the place has nothing more to give to those who plan with the place, then it is necessary to start looking, also to remind the city of what it has forgotten or no longer knew it had. It is a form of respect and dialogue. The relationship with memory has always been fundamental for Luca.

C.D: What are your ideas for the future of the studio?

C.A.S: It is a space that must remain, moving forward or transforming it into a Foundation. I am convinced that it represents a historical moment of architecture that can be touched and breathed here. The Italian and foreign students who come to visit it stay there for hours, focusing on every project, model or detail, because here they understand that they are learning. These last years after Luca’s death have been complicated in every sense, then with Covid several projects underway, also in China, have remained suspended and now a lot depends on what will happen after this pandemic period.

C.D: Lastly: what was the word that Luca hated most and which one did he love most?

C.A.S: The first is arrogance. In design, in architecture, in feeling. For him, arrogance summed up the worst of the worst. The second “context”, even if Luca would never have used it, but still the place, the territory.

CD: I think his favorite word was “Cinzia“!