Trailer Architecture art living matter

Not eligible for AIA CES Credits

Lorenzo Guzzini, founder of lorenzoguzziniarchitecture who graduated in Mendrisio with Manuel and Francisco Aires Mateus, explores and experiments with space, investigating form, light and time through tensions between elements. Compression and expansion, full spaces and voids, lights and shadows define the grammar of an architectural language that writes and composes its own syntax on sensory experience.

Influenced by these principles, projects on living are rooted in their own territory in the complex dichotomy between tradition and innovation, where construction becomes a process of continuous knowledge, respect and reinterpretation between the practices of building of the past and the knowledge of today.

Thus, Casa del Tè was born on the slope that lies along the Lario and makes use of building technologies respecting the place, local resources and its morphology. A complex work whose large pitches are modeled to protect and accommodate an intimate space, a domestic hearth of sculpted volumes between light and shadow, where every threshold between the rooms is weighed with awareness and precision.

The rediscovery of the genius loci as a time of place, the vibrations of nature and the rituals of living, the changing face of water and the reinterpretation of the landscape and its perceptual transformations through light, its reflections and its diffusion, as a translation of an epiphany through matter. The alchemy of materials exposed to the passage of time, like a patina that changes, from architecture to ruin.

As in Villa Molli, a "stone score" carved "halfway up" between the lake and the mountain, where matter, landscape and perception reinterpret vernacular architecture and the genius loci. Soil, stone and water as synthesis elements of a symbolic and hermetic architecture facing the backdrop of the lake and Isola Comacina, where one can trace one of the references of the project: Pietro Lingeri’s houses for artists.

Light and matter as syntax of a building language, as in Casa G, in the center of Como, a recovery project capable of grasping the rhythm of time, of filtering it through the skillful study of light, its use and passage through materials, surfaces and volumes, modifying the sensory atmosphere of spaces, the perception of the environments, the alchemy of the place.

Alongside living, art exhibitions and personal research dot Lorenzo Guzzini’s experience, such as the installation "You Are Nature" for La Rinascente in Rome, an investigation into the dualism man-nature, between responsibility and awareness, in the spatial, visual and material translation of a manifesto; the artist residency in Amarante in Portugal, which ended with an exhibition of 21 pieces, nine of which on the theme of the shape of water, exhibited at the Amadeo Souza Cardoso Museum.

Thus, a thin, fragile and at the same time solid thread connects architecture and sculpture. Two distant disciplines, sometimes antithetical while similar, which give shape to matter following opposite principles and mechanisms: art, the result of an expression of freedom; architecture, the exact balance between archè and technè. Architecture, art, living matter.

Educational objectives

• Investigate the issues related to the relationship between architecture, genius loci and construction through the theme of living, studying the construction and planivolumetric complexity in the relationship with the context and the landscape;
• Highlight possible responses to the relationship with the existing heritage, reinterpreting architecture in the rural landscape in a contemporary way, suggesting recovery strategies or new constructions that focus on the architectural project as a mending element, as well as the attention to the settlement issue of the new intervention in the landscape;
  
• Explain the themes of the profession, the role of the architect in listening and translating requests, needs, resources and energies, in addition to the close relationship with the client and teamwork in the different phases of the project;
• Illustrate the projects by lorenzoguzziniarchitecture, studying their compositional language and their context, assessing their technological and constructive aspects, as well as the formal-compositional experimentation in the research between compression and expansion, full and empty spaces, light and shadow.