Botta bemoans modern architecture's detachment from its environment

Mario Botta's designs have been qualified as both earthy and spiritual. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Evry Cathedral in France and the Kyobo Tower in Seoul are some of the iconic buildings that he developed in response to their specific environments. The 65 year-old architect from southern Switzerland, who was once an assistant to Le Corbusier, believes that “good architecture is measured by the intensity of its relationship with the site on which it stands.”

The anchored geometry of Botta’s buildings is immediately recognizable, the materials he uses are invariably the same and yet each project is profoundly singular.  No building, he said, can be reproduced in a different setting without losing its meaning.

Botta qualified present-day architecture as being often too “abstract”, dictated by innovation rather than evolving in response to the local social and cultural heritage. “Why do we try to make buildings fly, when we should, on the contrary, be working with the powerful forces of gravity?” he asked the audience at the University of Lausanne.

Globalization, he fears, is producing buildings that are not adapted to their specific environments and even less to the demands of different climates. Our dependency on energy has become too great, the Ticino-born architect added.

Asked what he thought about sustainable development, Botta bowed his head and smiled before he answered. He feels his own “massive” architecture is already the answer, since it is made essentially of stone that weathers well and protects from the climate.

Good architecture, according to Botta, has always been in equilibrium with nature. Not a house in the past, not even a peasant’s home, was ever built without a patio, an entrance, a hall that acted as a filter to the outside world, he underlined. Now, transitional spaces have all but disappeared and technological prowess wants walls to be razor-thin.

But don’t think a moment that Botta is an aging nostalgic. He refused to be drawn into the bitter architectural debates that take place in this part of the world as soon as there is a new project. He offered to be appointed Mayor of Lausanne instead.  Rules, regulations and constraints in construction can actually inspire great architecture, he said.

Almost to prove this point, he showed a number of examples of his hallmark, geometric shapes that give no indication from the outside that they are open to the sky. They are the sources of the carved, natural lighting that gives his buildings an internal uplift. See, for example, the Church of San Volto in Turin, St John the Baptist in Mogno, in the Ticino, or the Samsung Museum of Art in Seoul.

“Buildings should last” said Botta “so they can be adapted by our descendants according to their own needs.” By introducing notions of permanence into present-day architecture, Mario Botta’s makes us look at it in a very different way.

Related links:

Mario Botta's website