L4 – L’architettura secondo Gardella

L’ARCHITETTURA SECONDO GARDELLA


AUTHOR Antonio Monestiroli
YEAR 1997
PUBLISHER Maggioli Editore
LANGUAGE Italian
ISBN 9788838744599


“Milan, Thursday, March 2, 1995. The appointment, as usual, is at 11:30 a.m. under the studio in Via Marchiondi, in the beautiful house that Gardella himself designed after the war, with Anna Castelli-Ferrieri and Roberto Menghi. It is the third meeting of this long and unforgettable interview, organized to publish a book intended for architecture students, on the trail of a famous example that marked the history of cinema. “It all started with a fall into the water”: this is the incipit of the book The Cinema According to Hitchcock by François Truffaut. In our case, the atmosphere is much less grotesque than what the two young French directors, Truffaut and Chabrol, experienced during their first meeting with Alfred Hitchcock. Still, the coffee scene that we are obliged to play every time at cocktail hour certainly has something of the famous Hitchcockian humor. The timing is strategic: the master cannot tire himself out too much, so after an hour and a half or so, just before lunch, he has to dismiss us. To tell the truth, in terms of energy, besides of course much else, our interlocutor beats everyone, and in each of the twelve meetings, which lasted from February to May of that year, we were always the ones who declared the conversation closed, the accomplice also being the noisy old recording tapes set to the canonical 60 or 90 minutes.