MILAN MILANO ITALY | VIA MONTENAPOLEONE PEOPLE & EVENTS | PEOPLE & EVENTS IN VIA MONTENAPOLEONE

The choice of putting 82 design projects in alphabetic order from A to Z, created and developed by Milanese designer and architect Luca Scacchetti makes this collection a kind of unitary portrait. “One of the advantages of this alphabetic collection – explains Scacchetti – lies in its being a diagram, a plot, a series of boxes A,B,C,D,E, etc. which can spread spatially to infinity, and contain an enormous number of words, objects, like a dictionary which can be slimmer or more complete depending on the number of pages, without changing its order and the organisation of its vocabulary. This means, first of all, that this is a book which has not been, and which can not be, concluded, merely representing an instant photograph taken while we are out running, along an unknown path, most of which still has to be discovered. And it is very relaxing to think "Well! Up to now I have done things this way, but now and tomorrow...". Scacchetti continues “Obviously everything which is here is nothing but a small part of what I have done and what I still have to do or want to do, and at the end of it all the virtual dictionary will be much bigger and perhaps even consist of various volumes."
He loves to define himself a "Milanese architect and designer", thus affirming the existence of a unique culture of the project which takes in both architecture and design; but also that this culture has had its specific centre of formulation in the planning experience which developed in Milan over those decades.
But who is he really, Luca Scacchetti? “Luca Scacchetti” – writes Aldo Colonetti, philosopher, historian and theorist of art, design and architecture - “is an architect who lives his time looking with great curiosity at past history because the future "is already here"; for Luca Scacchetti it is space and time which have allowed us to live. But it is for this very reason that we must never fall into line with that which already exists: planning for today means designing cities, architecture, not objects of "memory", but put into dialectic relation with the flow of time. His is an optimistic historicism which tries to overcome the material conditions of our existence, to go with our gaze beyond the confines of the "present which is given us".
Francois Burkhardt says of him “It is difficult on the current architecture scene – and even less on that of design - to find people who understand history as a repertoire to be drawn from and to transform, to put it at the service of contemporary research and the future generations. Today Luca Scacchetti is one of the rare exceptions. His multi-faceted work highlights that which he borrows from history, making liberal use of the chosen elements to given them back in different forms. This way of working, a method based on the recovery and assembly of different elements of style to form new organisms, often with new functions, is called "eclecticism"”.
Scacchetti’s gaze is that of an "artist" of drawing and watercolour, who entrusts his compositional incipit to his project and travel notebooks; the initial form represents the path from which his interventions on the world and on things develop.
And so it is. Like an ancient Renaissance engraver, Luca Scacchetti is an architect who works within the paths of memory, never neglecting details or the unusual, from one side and from the other, always seeking with the other – whether it is people or things, functions or even spaces in question – the reason for a "story", a context, always beyond the contingency of commission.
It is no accident that the book is organised in alphabetical rather than a traditional chronological sequence: the flow of the projects is written in the internal time of the designer, so that the reader can freely find a subtle guiding thread, for example, Lulù, a handle, and Luccichina, a lamp, before moving on to Maison Carrée, a library-container system, and so on this way, always changing the scale without ever forgetting - as befits a non-fundamentalist student of Aldo Rossi such as Luca - an attention to forms and to things.
Planning for Scacchetti means "reading and transcribing". As Walter Benjamin writes, "the power of a road is different depending on whether one walks it on foot or flies over it by aeroplane. And so the power of a text is also different depending who reads or transcribes it. He who flies over by plane sees only how the road winds over the landscape; only he who walks it senses its domination, and how from that same district, which for the aeroplane pilot is simply a distance of land, each turn reveals backgrounds, viewpoints, clearings and sights."
Luca Scacchetti travels through the districts of the modern project. And here and there he stops to transcribe and not only to read: the tickets of his journeys are the maps to help us understand his transcriptions, transcriptions from which the poetics of our author originate. Not all planners are authors, many remain readers or pilots: Luca Scacchetti is not a pilot. He is a wayfarer.

STUDIO DI ARCHITETTURA LUCA SCACCHETTI
via Marcona, 12
20129 Milano
scacchetti@scacchetti.com

EDITRICE COMPOSITORI
via Stalingrado, 97/2
40128 Bologna
Tel. +39 051 3540111
info@compositori.it