Le torri dell’aria installation

Within the sphere of the third edition of the event “Vivere sani, vivere bene” [Live Healthy, Live Well] (Vicenza 4-10 October 2011), devoted to the themes of health and wellbeing, the porticos of the Basilica Palladiana hosted the installation entitled “Le Torri dell’Aria” [The Towers of the Air].
Five tower structures, created based on a design by Riva 1920, tell of the importance of air in architecture. They were obtained from scented cedar trunks, excavated using the five-axes working technology. The three-dimensional form evolves from tower no. 1 to tower no. 5, emulating the passage of air inside wind towers, which are seen above all in desert countries and used to capture all the movements of air to bring freshness inside houses, so that the breath of nature occurs in harmony with that of humanity.
Imperceptible and delicate, the human being’s breath approaches that of architecture, which today must not be read only as a standardised and infallible discipline, founded upon technological and dehumanised evolution, but also as a humanistic discipline, where the individual’s sensibility and their history attribute that component of creativity to the construction that makes it close to existence.
The five towers are not straight and repetitive in their vertical development, but the depressions created by the movements of air that traverse it, modify it and humanise it.