WOODEN HOUSES

12 Racconti con Casette, Michele De Lucchi 

Corraini Edizioni Verona 2005 

There are architects using pencils to sketch on their notebooks, others prefer fountain pens, or watercolors. Some others  in order to contain their ideas and taking notes use  a chain saw Michele De Lucchi is one of them. The chain saw used to work on wood, I forgot, De Lucchi goes right from the beginning he doesn’tuse paper he carves,  he cuts, directly manipulating the solid material, he doesn’t add, deduct, to find a meaning. The purpose of those exercises are simple, to re-establish a contact with the deeper part of one soul, finding on the memory fold some stories.

My small houses are not real houses and not even projects to be realized, even if I’m an architect and I love drawing house to live in. they are not even symbolic models or suggesting some kind of theory, not even an attempt to establish a new “country- style”, even if a bigger care from the great modern architecture to the“small scale” would be helpful. Is more an excuse to write stories, very small as the houses themselves. There are stories,  remarks, anecdote, notes and memory of my professional live, on subjects which I’ve found most interesting and  intellectually and emotionally moving.

Even to tell stories there are different forms, autobiographies, collecting essays, projects, or written works ( have a look what Sottsass and Boetti were able to do with books and words on the preceding post). De Lucchi try to find a different form, which hide his shyness and his being reticent and reserved in a world where everything is said on a loud way, he whisper on the pages of this small book, meaningful and very  personal memories, his father, architecture and the relationship with a difficult client, hiding instead a strong complicity. Here for someone thinking a moment about creativity the author replies with his best written in the book itself:

There is no need of much creativity surely because when you name it vanish away.

De Lucchi architecture is an architecture fully reflecting the hiding stories of this books, the project is made of material, of handiness and hidden cleverness,  more than words he’s making  the wood for his spiritual exercise to reveal it.

What I really like is wood, it’s nature, it’s color and it’s perfume. I love the mild character submitted on the working procedure and the rebel one, restless and disrespectful when it change aging and drying. Nothing can smother it : it moves, it twist, it grain, it split, without rules or limits, sometime wasting few days work. Butwood is beautiful for its own life never extinguishing, even after many years: silently it carries on is underground movement, becoming even more precious for the color, the age and the sign of the time.

Materials, stories, memories, architecture blend for a brief moment, building up models created not to be transformed into buildings but to settle in the memory,  a need, to create endlessly particular circumstance, projects.