The Wooden Roots

Ah Michele, Michele… You did it again! I arrived in your studio in Milano, to talk about lunar moorings and urban sea, of floating and immersive installations, like the ones you designed for Azimut Yachts at the Fuorisalone in Milan. You weren’t there, you told me an architect «with a passion for problems» had kept you on Lake Maggiore. We had an online conversation - me from your studio, sitting in a meeting room with the scent of wood to stun me, you in the peace of your hermitage, the Chioso in Angera, and we talked about anything but.

Every time it’s like that. Michele is never where you expect him to be, always ahead, with a new idea rattling around in his head to design the future. Michele De Lucchi, architect and designer, entrepreneur and craftsman, above all thinker, born in 1951 in Ferrara, a long beard to distinguish him from his twin brother. Michele leads, always has a sideways view to offer you, talks only about what he is passionate about. He works well on his own but also in groups, with his AMDL Circle, a design studio that includes architects, engineers, psychologists, artists, and more, with the intent of developing projects to foster human relationships and improve the quality of the environment. A fluid organization that stimulates creativity to design objects and buildings that express the spirit of the times: lamps and furniture elements for the best-known Italian and European companies; spaces, buildings, graphics and corporate identity for large corporations and multinationals. And never mind that, in 1987, he designed one of the most successful lamps in the world - half a million pieces a year are still produced - the Tolomeo for Artemide, awarded the Compasso d’Oro. Michele subverted again and founded Produzione Privata in 1990, a brand dedicated to the production of objects without commissioning. Always pushing forward. Tolomeo’s mechanism was born before the lamp: watching a fisherman retrieve his line. A suspended rod, with adjustable arms and head, and a spring mechanism, to adjust height and tilt, great flexibility. From the spoon to the city. So, let’s start right from the sea and visions of new scenarios.

City and sea: there is also the sea in Milan, although many people don’t think about it. Can you tell us about Seadeck and Mooring by the Moon installations you made for Azimut in Milan?

Speaking of boats, you still have to put them in a body of water, even though at the Darsena, we didn’t bring boats but a walk by the sea. I am not one to dive into the water, I would like to be able to float. And this metaphor of floating fits me very well. The fact that we can stay on the surface, and we can control what happens around us, matches me very much as a character. Talking about all the fantasies about cities of the future, how they can expand on the earth’s crust, one of the most beautiful, fascinating, most scenario-rich possible solutions is just floating cities. There is a very beautiful project by Bjarke Ingels, the architect of BIG studio, and we also did a study for a floating fair city. I think developing floating urban expansions is one of the most beautiful possibilities to develop. I don’t mean artificial islands.

Like in Dubai.

Yes, I mean real floating platforms, and floating is just a terrific solution for infrastructure. The real subject to act on is the infrastructure that will characterize the evolutionary capacity of cities and societies. Last month I took a trip to New York and one to Hong Kong, and I was able to directly compare the state of the two iconic cities of the Western world and the Eastern world. In absolute terms, Hong Kong is much more evolved, but not because of the skyscrapers, the finger towers as they call them, but because of the quality of the infrastructure. We cannot really think of evolving as a society, as the organizational structure of contemporary man, if we do not take action on the quality of all infrastructure, land, sea and air. Cities need a huge, gigantic, continuous, supply, not only of things to eat, but also of building materials, it is a continuous bringing in product and bringing out garbage, they are organisms that consume all the time. We keep bringing very sophisticated products into the city by the most conventional, traditional, old-fashioned means. Just think that we have subways, an underground fabric, and we only use its potential to move people, not goods or garbage.

So, a city on water would have the great advantage of making us completely rethink the idea of infrastructure. But how do we design the future?

We know the future with today’s imagination, which is dictated by today’s technological capabilities, which will evolve in the future. Someone calls our age the exponential age, because the change we have experienced so far has been relatively slow, but it will become faster and faster every year. Look at what is happening with artificial intelligence, it is changing connections, relationships, efficiency. Apple has said that it will use artificial intelligence to manage services in the new iPhones. Everything will change. Water can make people think about new infrastructure, where everything can be much more flexible, controllable, renewable over time. 

Who do you think are the central figures in designing the city of the future? The architects?

There is a lack of ideas! We are in a state of idea asphyxiation; we are always stirring the same soup. Let’s hope the new generation has a little more courage and emotional drive. Think about agriculture. We are knocking down forests to grow canola, soybeans and wheat, things that by the way are not even needed to feed humans but animals. Everything is askew. Agriculture can be done in a much more innovative, simple way, using much less water and land. There are experiences around the world to implement, related for example to urban farming. Anything you want directly in the city, it has to be grown in the city, using very little energy and water resources.

I really like this model of a floating city. What should the houses in a floating city look like? Will people live on boats?

There is a beautiful documentary film by Victor Kossakovsky, Architecton, shown in Berlin this year which asks how architecture needs to find the meaning of construction again, reflects on the use of concrete, highlighted as a problematic building material due to the extensive environmental damage caused by its production. To make concrete we crumble rock, we knock down mountains, we make environmental disasters. There is, above all, need of a huge amount of energy. It is extimated nearly 3 percent, if I’m not wrong, of CO2 emission is caused just by concrete. Then, once used, becomes a sterile material, you can’t do anything with. Now, I’m building a small house with the commitment not to use concrete, glues, synthetic materials. It’s all made of rock, stone and wood. Definitely houses in a city on water will have to be made of floating material. Wood for me is the most beautiful material.

Wood is your material, you create everything with it, even your little sculpture houses.

As Stefano Mancuso says, if we could plant, I don’t know the exact number, 100 billion trees, the planet would have solved all the climate problems. Apart from that, wood is a living material, it comes out of a plant, while it is born it is soft and flexible and when it gets old it becomes rigid and solid. It seems to be just the material made for man to realize how much precious material he has on his hands. A materia he does not know how to use or knows how to use only a small percentage of. Then I imagine that floating cities are made mostly of small buildings. The most important cities must be developed in height, condensing a large number of people and services into a few buildings. Though when, for example with the pandemic, there was a social and organizational earthquake, this created big problems for many investors related to buildings for tertiary use, offices, because the office is in itself a very rigid and inflexible building type. Smaller buildings made of materials that transform over time, that oxidize and change color, could give us the possibility of inventing cities that are much more natural and much more in tune with the evolution of man and the organization of the social structure.

So what is sustainability for you?

The idea of a better world will never be achieved through pain, suffering, penance, degrowth. We will never be able to convince the world to suffer, because then we will suffer less afterwards. The salvation of the world, if we want to speak in biblical terms, can only happen if we can distribute dreams, desires, passions, exciting fantasies, seductions. We can conquer an idea of a better future if we build a relationship that is more heartfelt, more authentic, more within reach with nature. And so the goal, even for architecture, is not to build bigger and bigger and cheaper and cheaper, but it is to produce a series of visions that can conquer, attract and convince everybody that it is the right direction to go.

It seems strange to me that you haven’t yet drawn though a nice wooden boat.

I would really, really like to.