Remo Buti: Varie-Età (ENG)
Remo Buti: Varie-Età (ENG)
Varie-Età, written by Giovanni Bartolozzi, Pino Brugellis, and Matteo Zambelli, delves into the fascinating world of Architect Remo Buti. Below is the lengthened version of an excerpt I wrote that was featured in the book, translated into English.
Remo never talks about buildings like architects do. Rather than discussing sterile construction details, measurements, heights, and other dimensions, he instead talks about doors that let you into unique, special places, like the flower door he designed for Modo many years ago.
Remo talks about a certain type of architecture that beckons you to sit in a corner with two or three friends and exchange stories; the corner is the real inspiration for the design, and in those stories is the true essence of architecture. He is interested in mass culture: comics, Sanremo’s songs, soulful American jazz, discos, raves, Gregorian chants in dark churches filled with incense, pop concerts in a huge stadium, Playmobil, smurfs, tiny plastic garden gnomes, the toys you find in Kinder eggs, Pokemon, two-euro plastic white chairs, the 1950s lamps you find in your grandparents’ home, and the ceramic plates from the pizzeria next door. With all these objects and the thoughts and thrills that each one of them carries within, Remo designs and builds interiors, furniture, jewels, models of bridges that are impossible to build, and houses of one thousand and one nights. All the while he is dismantling and reassembling pieces, and getting his hands dirty with polyurethane foams, woods, paints, brushes, and spray cans.
Remo's lessons were always held in the darkness of a large classroom, usually at Minerva in Piazza San Marco. The only source of light emanated from the slides that he projected onto the big screen but, unlike the other professors, Remo never showed extravagant projects or opera maxima by famous architects. Instead, the images were of a door leading into his magical world of colorful houses, infinite ceilings, lamps, chairs, suitcases, facades...an almost endless series of images of projects by previous years’ students that left everyone with their eyes wide open, struck with confusion at how such perfect models could even be real. Those models were a glimpse into another possible world, the special world that Remo built during his entire life and to which, in an infinitesimal way, I hope to have contributed to.
Remo, in class, never taught the architecture of certainties, textbook architecture that perfectly fits within its context, or even architecture made by the powerful who desperately try to leave a mark. He was never interested in permanent, self-assured architecture. He didn't teach solutions, let alone claim to have all the answers; even in the conflictual environment that always fostered debate, there were no wrong projects, only beautiful ones.
He told us about how he had designed his house by covering everything in gray, including furniture, radiators, walls, and doors. In a gray house, the protagonist is the inhabitant and his or her state of mind in that moment. The protagonist could also perhaps be a bunch of yellow flowers that somebody brought in, or the clothes you wore that day. "Architecture is me" he always repeated. What he wanted to tell us was that architecture serves as a stage for our lives and is penetrated, enveloped, and transformed day after day, each time in a different way.
Other times, it is architecture that transforms our lives through colors, scents, lights, and special finishes that reach you on a sensorial level. And so we design hotels or gardens with infinite rooms, each one for a day of the year: one to bring us tranquility, one to burst our eardrums with thundering music, one for sleep, one for love, one for intoxicating scents...a room for every possible and impossible state of mind.
Today it seems to me that Remo has always been more interested in the evanescent moment of our everyday life than in the monument of certainties, even if those uncertainties produced ruins, as much as the “Ruins” that Sottsass showed years earlier at the Design Gallery and that Remo showed us incessantly. Perhaps the ephemeral interior that we designed with him was a metaphor for our existence, and these projects’ essence lies in the beauty of that moment, as fleeting as it may be.