Life & Death in Milan

My book, The Architect & Designer Birthday Book, is, among other things, a celebration of life: The birth and lives of 366 architects, designers, artists, and inventors who have literally changed the world over the last couple of millennia. Linked only by their birthdays, in a calendar of biographies, utterly disparate people like, say: Andrea Palladio/Minoru Yamasaki (November 30 & December 1), Claude Nicolas Ledoux/Pierre Jeanneret (March 21 & 22), Walter Gropius/Giovanni della Robbia (May 18& 19), Norman Foster/Carlo Scarpa (June 1 & 2), Vignola/Bjarke Ingels (October 1 &2), Denise Scott Brown/Piranesi (October 3 & 4), or Michele de Lucchi/Stanford White (November 8 & 9), face each other across the gutter of the book, and often across centuries. These often strange book-fellows earn their position in the calendar by the quality of having been born.

We all have birthdays and share them with the famous and infamous, the unknown and, of course, with millions of ordinary and unknowable people. It is one thing every human has in common (other than DNA and all that defines); a birthday.

The other thing we all share is death, and although one’s ‘death day’ is not celebrated with cake and candles (except perhaps while sitting Shiva or attending an Irish Wake) it is the other bookend of a life. Newspapers (those paper relics of local life) once recorded both births and deaths in (almost) equal measure, which seems about right.

And so it was a potent diagram, if a surprising contrast, that my recent event at the Triennale Milano (THE museum of design, in THE Italian city of design) stacked my own celebration of birth in a space directly above that featuring the casket of Pierluigi Nicolin, lying in state in the museum.

Pierluigi Nicolin was an architect, a professor at the Politecnico in Milan, where he graduated in 1967, and the editor-in-chief of Lotus from 1978, but seems to have been editor since at least #9 in 1975, the first issue I purchased, until the last I bought in 1995, #81. These numbers (as Europeans seem to call ‘issues’ of magazines) correspond fairly closely to the ‘Electa years’ when, after a 4-year absence, the magazine was restored to publication and went from an annual to a quarterly.

The 11 issues I have are all remarkably consistent at time when architecture was absolutely not! The years are the height of Postmodernism and the period when architecture went from being a fairly staid discipline to one that competed with the fashion industry in popularity and the expectation of constant newness. They were, for me, the years I went from being a student, to a traveler on fellowship, to an employee, to an employer to a partner at Pentagram. So no real consistency on my part either, but how reassuring to have something as ephemeral as a magazine be the constant as the world, and my world, shifted monumentally.

Lotus was, among all the other architecture and design pubs then in print, the intellectual’s vehicle. It was also a reliable predictor of who would become the famous architects (or buildings) of today, 40-50 years later: Rem Koolhaas, both Kriers, Aldo Rossi, Alvaro Siza, Liz Diller (when they were listed as Scofidio and Diller!) whose drawing of the Kinney house, in an article penned by John Hejduk, graced the cover of number 44 in 1984. Steven Holl, Denise Scott Brown (and her husband), Manfredo Tafuri, Colin Rowe, Richard Plunz, Matthias Ungers, Rafael Moneo, Portzamparc, Vidler, Eisenman, Calatrava, Gehry. A number with a Casa Malaparte cover (and featured in measured drawings made that year, 1988), Gio Ponti’s Villa Panchart, Corb’s Une Petite Maison and the Schroeder House…all in one issue. I could go on and on and on.

I realize now that these are the foundational issues (in both senses) for me and a generation of architects trained in the rather dull 70’s but growing through the explosive years that followed. Like the music we listened to (and yes, I know how this sounds, but still…) somehow these are still current; listened to, looked at, discussed and influential. It’s not that nothing interesting or important is still being recorded/designed/built or published, just that 50 years is a long time for things to remain ‘current’.

This, to me, begs the question of time; is 50 years an eternity or a nano-second? Both, of course, but I seem to be mildly obsessed these days with time. Just read Notes From Deep Time, about to read The Order of Time, just wrote a book in exactly a year about a birthday celebrant every day of that year, and currently writing another book about buildings every year of the century from 1900-2000. It may be my age, when I just realized I have no time to spare (plenty of time, but no time to waste) and the elasticity of time is more obvious than ever.

Time magazine (and note the segue…subtle, huh?) had and has a red border that is integral to its identity, and Lotus is and has always been a square format, equally distinctive and distinguishing. It is thick, weighty (and square) a format that remains and is an identifying feature as prominent as Time’s red border or National Geographic’s yellow one. Lotus adopted (or more likely created) the dry, dense, black and white countenance of academia in a magazine so stylish it still looks modern.

It is no wonder that Pierluigi (if I may call him that) was so beloved; he spent 50 years making a remarkable publication, producing buildings, and teaching, the trifecta that makes the rest of us feel utterly aimless, idle and lazy. But lying in state (fortunately in a closed casket) in a vast hall just inside the museum entrance, is quite a gesture.