ETHICS OF BUILDING, THE

Mario Botta's villas, schools, banks, office and administrative buildings, museums and churches are structures of extraordinary visual power. How do they come into being? What are the foundations and constants in Botta's design process? What are the convictions behind them and the experiences derived from thirty years of creative work? This book answers these questions in three chapters, revolving around the themes of city, architecture and design. To Botta, the most primary and important task of the house is to protect and comfort; it is the place where the individual can find himself. Consequently, Botta describes the city as the "house" of a community, a house which should permit the most varied of interactions. The design in either of these two realms should never disregard the other. The architect must not forget that one of his essential tasks is to enrich the city that all too often threatens to deteriorate into an agglomerate. Architecture that deserves its name is "pensieri costruiti": constructed ideas; it therefore does not limit itself to the functional and the pragmatic, but holds a beacon pointing to what already exists. When it comes to his furniture designs, Botta is fascinated by the tension between unchanging function and the persistent search for new aesthetic interpretation. Botta, who understands himself more as a «man of the construction site"than as a theoretician, consequently underpins this discourse with examples of his own sketches which make his visionary ideas vivid and plastic. Mario Botta's Ethics of Building is the confession of a Mediterranean architect whose enduring merit it is to have rediscovered for us the primordial and elementary states and needs of mankind, and to have given these form in exceptional buildings.