Design Cino Zucchi Architetti with Visser van Aalderen Architecten. Text Stefano Casciani. Photos Allard van der Hoek. Even for someone like me who is not an expert in the Theory of Catastrophes, the poetic denomination of this mathematical application of topology to the study of nature suggests that precisely situations of sudden chaos can engender fresh forms of life – but also, as in this design, new species of architecture.

The narrativity (a word adored by Anglo- Saxon critics and architects) of this construction is already embodied in the chance that determined its birth, namely one of the most terrible disasters in Dutch history. On 13 May 2000, in the warehouses of SE Fireworks, 177 tons of fireworks caught fire and exploded. In the blaze, 1,500 houses were destroyed, 22 people died, 947 were injured and 1,250 were left homeless. On the site of this immense explosion today stands a sad iron memorial bearing a representation of the area originally occupied by the SE factory. A truer and more vital monument to the catastrophe would seem on the other hand to be the new quarter that has risen again on that same site, imagined in its broad outlines by de Architekten Cie., the Dutch office of Pi de Bruijn and Partners.

It was de Bruijn in person who one day approached Cino Zucchi to propose that he should design a villa. To be situated on the Museumlaan – the new road that joins two museums at either end of Enschede – it would be inhabited by a doctor interested in contemporary architecture. The master plan of the site allocated to the villa prescribed a volumetry modulated on recessed floors, and a progressive dematerialisation of the built mass to accentuate its verticality and assert its decisive modernity.

The theme is not new. Indeed it was already experimented with in the Mitteleuropa of the 1930s. But it is developed here by Zucchi first of all on the basis of conversations with the client’s family about everyday life (during which it emerged, for example, that his wife loves cooking while watching the movements of people outside). The interior design was thus developed organically with the idea of a “house of dreams”. This can be seen, for instance, in the numerous small supplementary spaces – more intimate than the communal areas – generated by the articulated connections between different levels. Or in the various transparent zones facing the exterior, arranged in an apparently random manner along the building’s outer perimeter.

The story would be too straightforward, were it not for the fact that the client’s personality also intervened. Fascinated by Zucchi’s idea, he was nevertheless also determined to add a few autobiographical touches to it, by virtue or necessity. Hence the inclusion of somewhat assorted furniture, a dark baluster for the central staircase between the floors, and other interior “commonplaces”, handled moreover in detail by Zucchi. The architect, however, who is close to the crystalclear ideas of Loos about architect-client relations (after all, it’s the client who will be living in the architect’s work, maybe even for the rest of his or her life), does not seem to have been particularly bothered by certain minor contaminations. And this is understandable, for in any case the outside, the building’s most visible form, indelibly displays his sign as the capable organiser of unstable balances: not just superimposed volumes, but a meticulously studied movement in space. This impresses a sharp dynamic on the whole design, giving rise to simultaneous perspectives and an unusual architectural object, at once solid and liquid. On the outside too, the client’s decision to economise on the rear “facade”, by substituting the glazing of the original plan with zinc sheets, is not unduly disturbing. Indeed it even perhaps makes the whole thing more interesting. The large blind and broken wall lends an enigmatic note to an architecture that might otherwise over-reflect Bruno Zevi’s cherished idea of four-dimensional decomposition, also borrowed from the pioneers of De Stijl, from Van Doesburg to Rietveld. Between chaos as the source of a new order and the totally aleatory fate behind this story, one is reminded of Mallarmé’s phrase taken by Man Ray as the absurd key to interpretation of his Dadaist film about another celebrated architecture: the Villa Noailles designed by Rob Mallet-Stevens, which was somehow the predecessor to, if not the inspiration for Zucchi’s house in Enschede:
Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hazard.
“a throw of the dice will never abolish chance”, or at least the risk which every architect must run in order to show him or herself to the world as the – possibly slightly subversive – creator of a work even in the face of the unpredictable consequences of destiny.