Luigi Snozzi

John Tuomey

In the final slide of his AAI lecture Bernard Tschumi suggested a division of architectural endeavour into two opposing categories, the normal and the extraordinary, the 'dumb box' and 'architecture'. An explanatory table listed the characteristics of the functional and everyday as boring and banal and elevated the role of the exceptional as the source material for architectural expression. From one who had begun so brilliantly and sought to expand the territory of architectural enquiry 'architecture is the materialization of concept' it seemed a gloomy conclusion to revert to such conventional distinctions between building and decoration.

Pevsner long ago proclaimed his pompous and discredited definition that 'a bicycle shed is a building but Lincoln cathedral is Architecture'. Tschumi's intricate Le Fresnoye would convince you of his belief in the architectural value of the shed, but his Dublin declaration aligns him with Pevsner in the separation of the organ from the tissue or indeed with property market parlance where the emphasis on the feature masks the ethical emptiness of the whole.

In a humane and saucy lecture to the AAI Henri Ciriani flamboyantly suggested that architecture was nurtured from the twin breasts of gravity and generosity and that the only reason an architect would get out of bed in the morning was to change the world. Glamorous and inspirational as Ciriani's slide show was, the antidote for those suffering from the Tschumi snakebite was delivered by Luigi Snozzi's description of his sustained role as architect to the village of Monte Carrasso in the Ticino valley of Switzerland.

Snozzi's lengthy lecture began with a series of aphorisms expressed in the form of apparent paradoxes ; 'do not relinquish your responsibility, concern yourself with form' and 'the aqueduct takes on life from the moment the water ceases to flow', before he engaged his audience in the real substance of his talk which was the problem of the relationship of architecture to context. He argued that contemporary architects try to cultivate perfect projects, an attitude which produces a series of monuments with no connecting context and leads to the inevitability of empty cities. Snozzi believes that we live in a highly developed democracy with one major fault, we have no idea of what the city should be.

Monte Carrasso is raised above the former marshes, agricultural land now the hinterland of the city of Lucerno and colonized by industry and development. Rather than blindly protecting the village from its inevitable absorption by the city, Snozzi proposes that the village be revalued so that it can continue to exist in a coherent form. In 1977 he was asked to prepare an alternative plan to the conventional diagram of the core zone and peripheral zoning into its segregated functions. He replaced 170 rules of the zoning plan with 7 simple rules. He proposed that the derelict monastery at the centre of the village should be revitalized as a public square surrounded by the primary school which hitherto had been zoned for an out of town site.

The radical transformation of the abandoned monastery and the adjoining cemetery is a refined demonstration of Snozzi's urban theory put into practice in architectural form. His seven simple rules emphasize the regeneration of the urban morphology free from aesthetic controls and without resorting to stylistic reproduction.

When asked at the end of the lecture to outline the seven rules, Snozzi was able to recite only six and immediately announced his resolution to eliminate the seventh rule on his next visit to Monte Carrasso. If it could not be remembered it must no longer be necessary.

Luigi Snozzi is a rare breed of architect:principled, practical and idealistic, at the age of 67.

John Tuomey, architect.