#1. VACCHINI QUESTIONS 

The 2nd of April 2017 marks 10 years since the death of Livio Vacchini (1933-2007). It is the moment of a retrospective look towards his architectural legacy. He was one of the masters of the so-called Ticino School, together with Mario Botta, Luigi Snozzi and Aurelio Galfetti. Even though they came to the public attention as representatives of an architectural school on the occasion of the famous 1975 exhibition ‘Tendenzen - Neuere Architektur im Tessin’, the work of Livio Vacchini stands as a unique way of conceiving architecture and cannot be comprehended by attributing it to a style, group or architectural movement. Vacchini places his thought in the space opened up by the greatest masters of architecture, from Louis Kahn and Mies van der Rohe and back to the architects of the ancient Greek temples, of the Pyramids and even of the Stonehenge.

His legacy is classical in the sense of its timelessness, by resisting to contemporary novelties and always taking the part of the inner logic and coherence of the architectural project. In a contemporary world where knowledge is defined by means of quantity and diffusion, Vacchini’s importance is crucial as he operates a vertical cut going to the fundamentals of architecture on the axis of time and logic and being able to see the sacred in a discipline which is informed by the everyday reality. In doing so, he attained an extraordinary synthesis of practice and theory in the concrete act of making the project.