Michael Obrist [feld72] in conversation with Cino Zucchi about "Shaping the interfaces between the public and private realm"

Shaping the interfaces between the public and private realm
Sleeping, washing, studying, preparing food, putting things away, resting after work: the units of activity contained in “functionalist” diagrams aimed to reform the human dwelling to meet universal needs, opposing the morality of the Neues Wohnen both to the social hypocrisy of the middle-class home and the squalor of the slums of the industrial metropolis.
But if the rationalist manuals contained the stylized outlines of a “standard” humanity, today the concept of “personalization” transforms the house into an existential niche governed by the individual choice of the “dropdown menu.”
The dialectic between privacy and urbanity, between the right to individual expression and the conservation of public space, can perhaps be resolved today through the creation of spatial “interfaces” or “buffers”. The landscape of the Interieur − from the elegy of the Biedermeier to the protoplasm of IKEA − needs to be wrapped by osmotic membranes that regulate the exchange between two environments: windows, terraces, balconies, screens, porticoes that create environments governing the transition between outside and inside.
The European city needs to metabolize better the mosaic of subcultures which increasingly characterizes it, accepting into its “rational” body the lively anomalies that bring the metropolitan dimension to life as stated by the prophetic words of Josef Frank: “The new architecture will rise from the bad taste of our period, from its intricacy, its motleyness and sentimentality. It will be a product of all that is alive and experienced first hand: at last an art by the people, not an art for the people.” *

*Josef Frank, Architektur als Symbol: Elemente deutschen neuen Bauens. Vienna: Verlag Anton Schroll & Co., 1931.

Cino Zucchi
Born in Milano in 1955, Cino Zucchi has earned degrees in Architectural Design at M.I.T. and at the Politecnico di Milano, where he is currently Chair Professor. He has taught in many international design workshops and has been “John T. Dunlop Visiting Professor” at the GSD of Harvard University. Author of several articles and books on matters of architectural and urban theory, he participated to various editions of the Milano Triennale and of the Venice Biennale of Architecture, where he has been the curator of the Italian Pavilion in 2014. He has been the chairman of the jury of the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture / Mies Award 2015.
Together with his studio CZA he has designed and realized several projects, among which the urban renewal of the ex-Junghans factory site in Venice and the ex-Alfa Romeo-Portello Nord area in Milano, the Keski Pasila master plan in Helsinki, the Car Museum and the Nuvola Lavazza Campus in Turin, the Salewa HQ in Bozen and several housing projects in Italy and Europe.