Vacchini Studio (Locarno)

Livio Vacchini based his design on ritual, cadence, rhythm and ethics. There is a form of ritual in the way a project is revised and retraced from time to time. From a "mother" project, ethical and theoretical, the design stages follow a path of research that always takes up the same reasoning and brings it to ever greater precision of expression. The result is each time new and profoundly changed from the previous one and yet so similar. With each mutation, the mother project is enriched with new rules, theory and ethics; it is perfected, leaving behind errors and inaccurate evaluations. Aesthetics is the result of this ancient ritual where thought, expressing itself in its purity reveals its own beauty, which does not need to be created since it already is. Therefore, the first project is always the first project in human history. The continuous and constant dialogue with the architecture of the past is what allows today's architecture to approach perfection and thus beauty.

Dialogue means criticism. Criticism means extreme admiration; that admiration that allows us to extract thought from a masterpiece to express it again in a cleaner key. Clean thinking is what makes us perceive a work as "classical" or "ancient" because it expresses its essence. Light, structure and space then find that wise balance attainable only through centuries of observation by the human mind. Every material has its own behavior to light, to gravity, to its matter. A cast and molded material does not have the same soul as an assembled material, which is still different from a complex material cast inside a formwork. The properties of each material must be expressed and brought to light. Only in this way can the material itself give the maximum of its possibilities and found the structure that suits it best express itself in ever more spectacular performance. Man has always had a desire to experience the thrill of the limit. Limit means truth, perfection. Perfection and truth are a source of excitement.

Technique and technology allow man to ascend to higher and farther limits to experience the construction of ever more precise and exciting spaces. Therefore, for man, building a space means guiding light into a space through materials and structures that, pushed through technique to their highest limit, throughout human history go in search of perfection and thus truth and beauty.