Suspended houses, self-taught Brutalists and Catalan vaults: an exhibition rewrites the myth of Ticinese architecture

Suspended houses, self-taught Brutalists and unexpectedly Catalan vaults (so many of them): all of this, in Ticino. This is what one risks discovering by exploring Ticinese architecture in person. The image obtained of what might by now be a cliché, a pre-packaged syntagma — modern and contemporary Ticinese architecture — can turn out to be decidedly new, unprecedented. An image that is perhaps even more authentic.

This is certainly the focus of the twenty years of work by the Construction and Technology area of the USI Academy of Architecture, the Mendrisio Academy, where students and professors have explored 180 buildings over the years with a hands-on approach, a close-up look that starts from construction. Surveys, archival research, photographic investigation into living and the marks of time: an attempt to discuss the assumptions of historiography but above all the way we come to know architecture.

Of these buildings, 88 have been selected for “La costruzione dell’architettura in Ticino, 1939-1996. Materialità e tettonica”, an exhibition that displays drawings, photographs by Roberto Conte, period films and documents, but also the representation of an “analogous Ticino”, as they have called it, a city made of study models that leads us to look at a unique architectural heritage with different eyes. It is the story of how one acquires a critical awareness of building, rather than a hyper-specialised technical know-how: the very specificity of studying in Mendrisio, as explained by curators Franz Graf and Carlo Dusi.

It is an exhibition of restitution. Certainly, the restitution of a body of work, but above all the production of knowledge, which combines that critical awareness made in Mendrisio with a very concrete role in the present: it serves, for example, to guide institutions on what to protect and restore, and how; it serves to prevent the “energy retrofits” that have swallowed the Corbusian exposed concrete masses of Flora Ruchat Roncati’s house in Morbio inside plastered insulating jackets; or to recognise that a building is clad with a patent — Fural, a dry-joint aluminium cladding — which has returned to production today, thus avoiding its replacement with any corrugated metal sheet.

All those apparent white elephants of building in Ticino then manifest themselves and, looking at them closely, cease to be so: they instead become expressions of a circulation of languages, ways of designing, building and discussing that cross a territory that is anything but isolated, indeed a true crossroads of international debates.

We see exposed concrete floating above the slopes of Verdasio in the holiday homes designed by Alfred Altherr in 1964 — somewhat like Wright’s Fallingwater, if you will. And we discover the name of the self-taught Brutalist who built not far from other well-known masterpieces: Angelo Andina, who based his house in Losone on concrete walls a metre and a half deep, supported by arches worthy of the most famous Niemeyer.

The Catalan vault, on the other hand, arrives with Aurelio Galfetti — the author of Castelgrande in Bellinzona, to reduce him to an icon — and with his nursery school in Biasca, the daughter of Le Corbusier’s maisons Jaoul, on which Galfetti himself would later intervene, but this time with that critical awareness that the exhibition continually seeks to trace.

What one begins to notice in Ticino, among the Mario Botta and Luigi Snozzi buildings in which — someone finally says it — one lives well, are the passages of global history, the intersections, the references. First of all, the great unexpected ones, such as colour.

“Modern is white” is a falsehood, says Graf. And in Galfetti’s kindergarten we find yellows, blues, a great noise of bricks, ceramics and concretes; in the “I grappoli” village by a young Manuel Pauli, the bright colours of the exteriors designed with Eva Pauli Barna.  

Then, still following the colour, we return to Losone, where Livio Vacchini declares that the reference for his famous school, rather than Schinkel, is the Craig Ellwood of light metals and California Modern; and you only need to look up to notice it.

But even Tita Carloni had defined his Arizona Hotel, with those Frank Lloyd Wright plans, as a “youthful mistake”. And be careful not to get too lost in the cluster of Peppo Brivio’s Valleggione house from 1969, which could lead us towards Tadao Ando’s modular megastructures, or towards the pattern of those “Doppelbungalow” that Dieter Rams would later design for Braun, and for himself, in Germany.

And again, anticipations of today that arrive from much further back in time: the Biasca arsenal, a 1942 project, with green roofs born from mimetic needs and the stones for the walls coming from the mountain that collapsed in the sixteenth century not far away. Or the Cinema-Teatro Blenio by Giampiero Mina, born in 1952 to offer a minimum of entertainment to the workers of a mountain dam, but built mainly by reclaiming the discarded timber from a nearby service bridge. Today we would speak of circularity.

Together with this rediscovery of Ticino under construction, the Teatro dell’architettura Mendrisio has built a game of counterpoints with an installation that rises from the ground floor through the entire height of the building and with the exhibition “Pino Musi. Continuum”.

The work of the Italian photographer embraces the exhibition ring of the theatre, articulated in six scrolls, sequences of images on a single roll that become six discourses born from space. Origin, Metonymy, Hyperbole, Surface, Transition, Incompleteness: a cycle of which the visitor can choose the beginning and end, as well as the distance from which to observe the images, allowing the rural architectures of the Sarno Valley, Gio Ponti’s Montedoria or the Brutalist slaughterhouses of Shanghai to emerge from time to time.

It is also a discourse on the distance with which Musi photographed the large scaffolding of Notre-Dame under reconstruction, identifying in that condition the moment when the cathedral became Heritage, crystallising into a global collective value.

In a sense, it is a discourse spoken in the same language as “La costruzione dell’architettura in Ticino”: that of entering spaces in a way that frees the eyes from any preconceived image.

Opening image: Livio Vacchini, Middle School, Losone, 1974. Photo Roberto Conte