WHICH FOREIGN word best captures our feelings at this jittery moment, writes Pauline Hall.
Especially for people in Ireland, schadenfreudeas the big fish flounder, angst in the wake of the Budget, ennui as the excuses drag on, all apply. But running counter to the thud, the hiss and the whine of those words, there's the less well-known sprezzatura. Roughly translated as dash or daring, these fizzy consonants can correct our queasiness. It's a quality that deserves to be deliberately practised. If it seems too inherently Italian, too full of Renaissance swagger, to easily catch on here, we should remember and celebrate how Irish architects have brought a substantial example of sprezzaturato its birthplace, Italy.
Grafton architects’ new building for the Luigi Bocconi University in Milan houses the scientific departments and research activities. Highly functional, technically complex, it’s a muscular, graceful presence that transforms a busy, fairly undistinguished street.
One commentator sums up the surprising impact of this building as “a world apart where gravity works where it wants to or where Grafton architects want it to”. Shelley McNamara, Yvonne Farrell and their colleagues opted to move elements of their building both up and down, both inwards and outwards: hoisting the offices up to hang clear between the double walls, suspended from the roof structure, and plunging down to hollow out the Aula Magna as far as five metres below street level, yet also raising it as a huge cantilevered form that swoops up, rises again to the outside, making an urban space, a piazza connecting the whole to the street and the city. An ordinary corner here becomes a space that no one can walk past without peeping down into the foyer and the entry to the Aula Magna. Looking out from inside, the building produces fluid, unexpected effects, when a huge glass wall reflects back images of the neighbouring buildings, creating illusions as a car, a tram or a buggy moves in and out of visibility, appears, disappears and reappears as if meeting itself. The staircases are generous in scale, to nurture serendipitous contact, to offer opportunities for flow and interaction. A democratic arrangement of research offices for 1,000 faculty members gives each occupant light and air of homogeneous quality and quantity. The offices are luminous boxes clad with glass panels which reflect light into the central courtyards and also though to the corridors.
Mark Twain wrote of the Duomo at Milan that it was “so grand, so solemn, and yet so delicate, so airy”. The new Bocconi, too, is both earthy and refined. The fragility of the glass panels is set against the heft of the external stone walls.
The main foyer is a big public hall, a marketplace, appropriate to foster collegial exchange among the researchers and teachers working here in the European equivalent of Harvard Business School. Bocconi plays a dynamic role in the entrepreneurial environment of Milan and the Lombardy region, which relates to the rest of Italy somewhat as if Chicago were located in California.
Milan is sometimes regarded as the least Italian of Italian cities, and there’s a sense in which the Milanese, who believe that they bankroll the rest of the peninsula, would in part flaunt that title. Henry James thought it “winterish, as if it were on the wrong side of the Alps”. The master overlooked how wide regional diversity is the happy by-product of Italy’s fractious evolution. In the course of a boisterous history, Milan has been in the 11th century an engine of civic independence and, in the 19th century, an engine of Italian unification. Now it’s an engine of the Italian economy.
For all the greyness and hard-headedness, the shorter lunch hours and numerous bicycles, Milan has its own way of being Italian. Milan, l'e Milano(Milan is itself), goes the saying. The Grafton team's study and acknowledgment of its architectural character was much appreciated by judges and critics, as creating a sense of belonging and ownership within the city to all those who use it. The new Bocconi alludes to those deep city blocks where stern frontages give way to gorgeous interior courtyards. For the solid facades, the architects chose a grey fossil-laden local stone, ceppo, which is as characteristic of Milan as the seductive earth reds and umbers are of Florence or Siena.
In Milan, if something is taking ages, it is described as la fabrica del Duomo, given that it took five centuries to fully complete the cathedral. The genesis of Bocconi was an invited competition announced in 2001, won in 2002, and completed in record time last November 2008. Now being regarded as a landmark in Milanese, Italian and European building, ("a small piece of real city"), it was honoured with the first World Building Award, won from a very distinguished field, and is one of five finalists short-listed for the European Union Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe award.
Some of the folklore about the building of Bocconi recalls the hands-on flair of medieval artisans. For example, one of the building team used his favourite espresso cup as a mould to cast plugs for the concrete formwork. Sprezzaturaagain: a spirit it would serve us well to cultivate.