The Legacy of a Gaze
How can the Città Ticino be transformed without erasing its traces? Drawing on Aurelio Galfetti’s vision, the editorial reflects on design as a means of caring for the territory: recognising what already exists, reconnecting fragmented relationships and imagining new ways of inhabiting places through measured interventions and shared responsibility.
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Many of the landscapes of Ticino’s valley floors have been endured rather than chosen. Their form has been shaped not by a shared vision, but by the layering of transformations arising from different needs. The result is a discontinuous territory, in which settlements and infrastructure have left fractures and unresolved spaces. Yet to recognise in it André Corboz’s palimpsest is to perceive, beyond its contradictions, the possibilities it still holds. It is an unfinished story, in which even places seemingly devoid of identity can become material for Architecture.
Seen in this light, design cannot stop at the scale of the individual building. As Aurelio Galfetti reminded us, «the design of space is the tool architects have at their disposal to build the territory». Building also means recognising what already exists, repairing broken connections and establishing continuity between different places and uses. Maintenance and transformation express the same responsibility for the ground, exercised through small gestures as much as through major infrastructure. The Greek word meraki, recently invoked by Martina Voser, seems to give this disposition a name: the passionate care one brings to one’s work, investing it with attention, sensitivity and something of oneself. We might recognise in it an approach to design that brings the precision of an intervention together with attention to what a place holds and the relationships that run through it. This responsibility does not rest with architects alone. It also concerns a community’s ability to recognise itself in the places it inhabits and to take part in their transformation. In Faido, in 1976, the campaign to move the motorway away from the town showed how a small community could influence an intervention on a major scale, giving the needs of those who live there weight alongside the demands of efficiency. A première in Switzerland. The territory takes shape through this interplay of expertise, needs and collective aspirations, without any single will being able to determine its outcomes entirely.
Perhaps we need to free Ticino’s landscape from its stereotypes, to recognise the labour, needs and relationships that have shaped it. There is nothing bucolic about a stone wall: it embodies intelligence, toil and a history that continues to evolve. Even where a recognisable identity seems absent, traces and possibilities remain that deserve attention. Design can give them a new voice without claiming to resolve every contradiction, bringing the fragments of the territory together into a shared discourse.
The Time of the Gaze
For this issue of espazium quaderni, we invited a single photographer to accompany the entire magazine with his images. This editorial choice reflects our belief that the encounter between the gaze and a work offers an opportunity for discovery, understanding and critical enquiry into the project. Together with the issue’s editor, Manuel Bellagamba, we developed a photographic sequence with Marco Introini, giving him full freedom to explore. The result is an attentive, personal study: a few carefully judged photographs that convey each place through his sensibility.
Born in Milan in 1968, Introini is an architect and documentary photographer trained at the Politecnico di Milano, where he teaches Techniques of Spatial Representation. His work begins with a process of drawing closer: he studies maps, documents and drawings, visits sites and records his impressions in sketches, sometimes from memory. Drawing precedes photography, helping him understand what will enter the frame. In a 2020 interview on espazium.ch, he described his central interest as «describing how we feel in space». These words shift our attention towards the relationship between architecture and those who encounter it.
All but two images are horizontal. The wide format invites us to see each work alongside its surroundings, tracing its ties to the ground, vegetation and other features of the landscape. It also echoes a convention of landscape painting, reflected in the English term «landscape» for the horizontal orientation of an image. The two vertical photographs introduce the «portrait»: a depiction of a particular place within the project, a variation that draws the gaze in and asks it to linger. Black and white lends the sequence continuity, drawing attention to the interplay of light, surfaces and the texture of materials. Each project ends with a double-page photograph. Its scale gives the reader time and space to explore it, letting the eye wander among the details that make up the place. This pause between projects reflects the nature of the works presented: small gestures, acts of attention and care for the environment, whose value calls for a quiet willingness to observe.
In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes distinguishes the «studium» from the «punctum». The former is the cultural interest through which we understand a photograph’s subject, context and intentions; the latter is what pricks us, a detail that may touch us personally, even beyond the photographer’s intentions. The «punctum» belongs to the encounter between image and viewer: it may emerge for one person and remain invisible to another. It is not an effect that can be prescribed. In giving the photographs space, we hope to keep this possibility open, welcoming whatever each reader may discover in them.
The experiment reminds us that the works shaping the human landscape ultimately find their meaning in people’s experience of them. With the same freedom as a critical text, the photographer’s independent gaze offers a chance to assess the value of a work in its physical reality, now part of the world and of other people’s experience. For the authors of each project, this encounter has a particular meaning: it allows them to gauge the persistence of their ideas in built form, to see how they have taken shape and what strength they retain once they become space. Photography thus returns the project to its authors through the eyes of those who encounter it, prompting reflection on the never entirely predictable distance between intention and the life of the work.
The Gaze of the Project
Manuel Bellagamba, Stefano Milan, Andrea Nardi
On 13 April 1995, at the Pavillon de l’Arsenal in Paris, Aurelio Galfetti delivered a lecture entitled La città Ticino. His thinking, developed in the early 1990s in connection with AlpTransit, proposed reading the territory of Ticino as a dispersed, polycentric city, recognising the forces that had shaped its form and continued to guide its transformation. Architecture engages with the relationships between buildings, infrastructure, landscape and public space. Rather than defining a unified urban model, the «Città Ticino» invites us to recognise the design potential inherent in the canton’s pattern of settlement.
Unlike Europe’s large cities, Ticino did not experience compact metropolitan development, but rather a gradual and fragmented process of urbanisation. Until the mid-twentieth century, small towns, historic settlements and agricultural landscapes made up a rural territory. Economic growth after the Second World War and the expansion of private car use, together with intensifying exchanges along the Milan–Zurich axis, fostered the emergence of a dispersed city along the main valleys.
The result is a landscape of peripheral development in which settlements tend to merge and the distinction between centre and edge becomes blurred. The «Città Ticino» did not seek to bring this reality back into the compact form of the traditional city: instead, it saw the possibility of another kind of urbanity, capable of giving continuity to a settlement system without a dominant centre. Topography gives the different parts of the territory their recognisable character, while infrastructure has shaped its organisation. The motorway encouraged linear growth along the canton’s main axis; the railway, from the Gotthard line to the completion of AlpTransit in Ticino, has strengthened connections between urban agglomerations, reinforcing polycentrism and fostering mobility beyond the local scale that, in some respects, resembles that of a metropolis. These connections bring places closer together without always succeeding in knitting their spaces back together.
Yet recognising this structure as a possible city did not mean having the means to build it. The vision encountered planning frameworks and economic forces that could scarcely be brought within a single coherent plan. Apart from railway-related transformations, large parts of the canton underwent fragmented residential development, predominantly of detached houses, leaving residual spaces, ill-defined edges and poorly structured communal spaces. Larger-scale developments have largely followed the speculative logic of the property market, while opportunities for architects have centred on public buildings, particularly schools. The problem was not so much a lack of architectural quality as the difficulty of extending the same care to the space that holds these buildings together.
The «Città Ticino» remained largely a vision for design: it offered ways of understanding the territory without succeeding in guiding its transformation. Even the development of a culture of the territory, pursued through the research projects of ICUP and ISUP at the Accademia di architettura in Mendrisio, struggled to influence the dynamics of development. This gap reveals how difficult it is to translate an idea of urban quality into a shared culture of building and inhabiting. Today, the field of action for design has changed. The question concerns not only urban expansion but the quality of a territory already extensively transformed. Galfetti’s words seem pertinent once again: «If a so-called peripheral region wants to live, it must change its aesthetic and allow its environment to be transformed». His statement can be read not so much as an invitation to embrace any change, but as a call to look again at the built landscape as material for design. Some architects working in Ticino today seem to be moving in this direction, finding the reasons for their work in the transformation of what exists rather than in the exceptionality of form. Public space and landscape architecture become instruments for intervening in the dispersed city. Squares, parks, paths, shores and stations can restore continuity, improve accessibility and give renewed meaning to places on the margins of urbanisation. Design begins with the particular qualities of each place, recognises its potential and introduces new possibilities for use without imposing an alien order.
Continuity with Ticino’s architectural tradition is thus to be found in a way of observing and transforming the territory, even before any shared formal language. If the «Città Ticino» offered a unified reading of the canton’s settlement pattern, contemporary interventions revisit some of its questions through targeted operations capable of engaging with the different scales of inhabitation. That vision is not something to be realised retrospectively: it can still inform a line of enquiry, through approaches capable of responding to the present.
The five contributions explore this possibility in different places and at different times. At Cabbio, the square gains legibility through the preservation and recomposition of the wall, trees, stones and fragments uncovered during the works. At Parco Lanchetta, the mineral memory of the shore accompanies the creation of a more direct relationship with the lake. In Balerna, railway elements, allotment gardens and paths transform a residual site into a place for everyday encounters. In Mendrisio, a space shaped by infrastructure opens up to routes through it, sporting activities and opportunities to pause. With Vivaidiffusi, finally, temporary installations of vegetation reveal other possibilities for urban space, involving residents in imagining a different city.
What these interventions share is a patient attentiveness to place. Material traces, vegetation and existing uses are not simply what remains: they become the starting point for imagining new ways of inhabiting. Precision in design lies in translating needs into measured interventions, whose value depends not on the exceptionality of form but on their ability to improve the experience of space and fit coherently within their context. Their significance will take shape over time, through everyday uses and relationships.
Martino Pedrozzi, interviewed for this issue, reminds us that the word «city» must also entail knowing how to act as citizens, recognising ourselves as part of the places we inhabit. It is perhaps here that the «Città Ticino» retains its relevance: not as an urban form to be reproduced, but as a shared consciousness of a territory. A way of recognising its limits and resources, and of taking responsibility, each from our own position, for its transformation.