Livio Vacchini Disegni / Dessins / Drawings

“This volume focuses on a central aspect of Livio Vacchini’s research: his drawings. The work of the Swiss architect is synthesized here through a selection of unpublished drawings – plans, sections and façades – which share a graphic criterion developed by the author over the years. Ten years after Vacchini’s death, these drawings are presented with the force of icons.
“I realised that the sketch was confusing me, that it forced me to follow it, to give it reason, as if the project had to adapt to the sketch… it was as if I fell in love with myself… a sin of vanity… and so, since then, I project horizontally. I relax and think, I think, I reason. I don’t use the pencil anymore. I concentrate trying to gather all the reasons for the project, carefully avoiding imagining forms, trying to build logics. ”
Livio Vacchini

If building sites build buildings, it is the discourse that builds architecture. The narrative at the basis of Vacchini’s work is synthesised in this publication through the unpublished presentation of drawings selected according to the graphic criteria developed by the architect himself over the years. About twenty years after their creation and ten years after Livio Vacchini’s death, his drawings are presented with the force of icons.
Vacchini chose to reduce the evocative and seductive power of the drawing in order to search for what precedes it. Drawing is not considered as a representative, descriptive or expressive skill, but as a logical capacity, as a synthesis, as a possibility to reduce to the essential. We cannot do without drawing, but we can reduce its signs to a minimum, in order to try to grasp what gives rise to the very conditions of possibility of the project and to let the phenomenon present itself in all its evidence.”