Interview with Mario Botta

INTERVIEW WITH MARIO BOTTA TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN BY LILY PRIGIONIERO irst recognized for a series of remarkable private throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas. In 1996, under homes in his native Ticino, Switzerland, Mario the auspices of the Swiss Italian University, he founded the FBotta (b.1943) is known internationally for his reli- Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio, Switzerland, a gious, museum, and commercial structures whose monu- school offering a five-year, accredited program in architec- Throughout the mental forms are humanized by a masterful use of light ture based on humanistic criteria. He has been honored and luxuriant stonework. internationally with numerous honorary doctorates, fellow- interview, Mario He is a church builder of first rank. His churches, ships, and museum exhibitions. Botta draws to shockingly unconventional in their archetypal simplicity, forgo the appearance and symbolism of traditional houses organize his thoughts of worship. Instead, he seeks to create a timeless, primary JUDITH DUPRé: In your native Ticino, the mountain and illustrate the experience of the sacred by returning to the fundamental meets the lake and north meets south. How have this motives of architecture—light, location, material, and region’s unique geography and culture influenced your points he wants to form—executed within the context of a highly individual work? make. It is a remark- response and an equally specific landscape. Botta’s churches define and elevate what is universal and, in so doing, MARIO BOTTA: Here we have the privilege of living able, fluid, and become meaningful expressions of faith. His insistence that between two cultures: the northern world, an internal prolific production. good building is an unalienable human right has provided culture, and the south, an external culture. In the north, RIGHT Conceptual sketch, Chapel the aesthetic and moral foundation of his work, which is in the Alps, the idea of a house is that of a structure that of St. John the Baptist, Mogno There is no apparent constructed with scrupulous attention to detail, and also an in a most profound sense gives protection—it is made (1992‒96). resistance between insight into the architect’s personal sense of responsibility, of wood, it is warm. It is the culture of the interior. In an integrity that he would not describe as spirituality but Italy, the Mediterranean, the house evolves from the PAGES 10-11 The Chapel of what he sees in his that reveals itself as such nonetheless. concept of the outdoor, external piazza. Here, we know Santa Maria degli Angeli, Monte mind and what His earliest ecclesiastical commission, completed the tectonic of the northern world, but also the great Tamaro (1990–96), located in a appears on the paper when he was twenty years old, was a parish house next to light of the Mediterranean. ski resort in the Swiss Alps, 5141 the church in his family’s village of Genestrerio. In 1979 he feet (1567 meters) above sea level, before him. completed a subterranean library at the seventeenth-century JD: How can you see Ticino, a place where you have is accessible only by cable car. The Capuchin Monastery in Lugano, and made subsequent lived and worked for nearly your entire life, with new chapel was commissioned by modifications to its chapel. The past decade has seen the eyes? Egidio Cattaneo, the resort’s completion of four of Botta’s churches; the first cathedral owner, as a memorial to his late built in France in over a century; a synagogue; a scale re- MB: You can never know a place that well. Every time wife Mariangela. Made of rein- creation of Borromini’s seventeenth-century church, San I go to an old place, I discover new things. It’s an infi- forced concrete faced with rusticat- Carlo alle Quattro Fontane; and the design of numerous nite reading. You can never really say you know a place ed porphyry, it is a hybrid design other ecclesiastical projects. until you have completed a project, because at that point that combines the shapes of a Along with his architectural practice, Botta teaches the project transforms the site. Architecture brings with viaduct, church, amphitheater, it the idea of transformation. It transforms the existing and tower. Botta extended a path equilibrium into another equilibrium. This is the magi- leading from the mountain via a cal aspect of architecture. Architecture always trans- processional walkway 213_ feet forms its site; it never leaves it neutral. This is true not (65 meters) long that is on axis only of my work, but of all architecture, whether pro- with the rising sun, and that found or banal. appears to emerge from the moun- What I love about architecture is not the con- tain and terminates in a belvedere structed volume, but its rapport with the empty space that overlooks, and constructs a that surrounds it. There is a continual give and take new relationship with, the magnif- between architecture and its context. When I make a icent panorama below. The chapel small house, it’s not the object that interests me, but the itself is located below the crucifix, ABOVE AND RIGHT Botta’s struc- spatial relationship that this object has with the land- under the walkway, and can be tures evolve from the modernist scape. If there were a thermometer capable of measur- approached from descending stair- tradition and reflect his appren- ing the quality of architecture, it would be able to cases on either side. ticeships under Carlo Scarpa, Le measure the transformation that has occurred in the Corbusier, and, most profoundly, landscape. When I see Ronchamp on the hillside, I see Louis Kahn. Though retaining that Ronchamp has transformed the landscape. That modernism’s rational, geometric building has constructed the landscape. forms, his buildings find their deeper roots in ancient archetypes, JD: Yes, and the landscape has defined that building. ruins of the past, and the striated stonework of the Tuscan MB: That’s true. Romanesque, such as that of the Ring is inviolability. Neither beginning nor end exist in it, it begins and ends everywhere. remote twelfth-century Chapel of JD: What is the process of taking possession of a place The ring becomes the form of cohesion, of girdling, of embrace. It becomes the expression of San Galgano near Chiusdino, and unearthing the memories that are connected with it? abundance and safety. Since, of all the figures, the ring unites the smallest perimeter with the Italy, interior and exterior views of which are depicted here. MB: The first act in making architecture is not to put a largest content, it is the richest and the most indwelling of them all. stone on top of a stone, but to put a stone on the earth. —Rudolf Schwarz, THE CHURCH INCARNATE, 1938 8 9 LEFT The chapel on Monte hands appear in a Marian litany, Tamaro is dimly lit like a grotto. a series of painted prayers of The theme of hands informs the praise to Mary, that are rooted in interior painting program. These a medieval, agricultural, intuitive primitivistic images were execut- understanding of the world. The ed in inlaid mortar by Enzo paintings—some of them are Silence is to Light Cucchi with the liturgical guid- shown in larger detail on this Light is to Silence ance of Padre Giovanni Pozzi. page—are located over twenty- Monumental hands in a gesture two embrasured windows set at The threshold of their crossing of prayer adorn the apse behind floor level that give visitors a view the altar. Smaller images of down the side of the mountain. is the Singularity is Inspiration (Where the desire to express meets the possible) is the Sanctuary of Art is the treasury of the Shadows (Material cast shadows shadows belong to light) —Louis Kahn, THE NOTEBOOKS AND DRAWINGS OF LOUIS I. KAHN, 1973 The Cedar is Mary, The Olive, tree of The Shadow is The Sea is Mary, The Book is Mary, The Pomegranate is The Rose is Mary, The Moon is Mary, because just as the peace, is Mary, Mary, in which the beyond measure by in which is written Mary, because, like delicate and flower- because she reflects cedar puts down whose twig carried afflicted and infirm reason of all the the Word in golden the fruit which con- ing in the sun of the light from the roots deep enough to by the dove to the find relief from the rivers of grace letters which every- tains a multitude of justice, made fruit- sun that is God and enable it to grow ark marked the fierce heart of which run into her, body must guard in sweet seeds, so she ful by heavenly dew, shines it on the higher than any reconciliation of adversity. inexhaustible for her the recesses of his encloses the sweet- whose purple hue is divine maternity, other tree, so she man and God. distribution of the heart. ness of all the the blush of mod- attracting the waves was so deeply con- rains of plenty, graces. esty, the ardor of of our afflictions. firmed in humility unfathomable in her charity, the zeal of as to allow her to liberality and justice. soar above all others transparency. when she conceived her divine Son. 10 11 It’s a way of possessing the earth. It’s a fundamental answer, must respond in the context of his own time. feet] high, came down slowly, five At Mogno, I rediscovered a sense of gravity, a sense act, a sacred act. It separates the microcosm of con- But the answer of any given time has a great historical kilometers an hour, and destroyed ten of light, a sense of the sun’s movement over twenty-four- struction from the macrocosm of the world.

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