Interview with Claudio Silvestrin

Does the architect respond to the client or to himself?
Every architect necessarily responds to himself. The architecture he expresses is the fruit of his values and sensitivity, the fruit of a personal quest, therefore. In a way, it is the transposition of his way of being. It is not a matter of following fashions or styles. It means translating an idea into shapes. A client will always choose the architect who best interprets his tastes and ideas.

So what are your personal quest and architecture?
Personally, since I find wasting to be unacceptable, I do not appreciate décor or anything that is juxtaposed to the essential. There are some elements that you cannot do without because they define the borders of a space or they give a shape to an object; otherwise, it has to do with décor, which is something that I find useless. This 
is also my way of being also in everyday life, it expresses my inner balance, there is no other way I could express myself than by disrupting my very self.

Would it be correct to define all of this with the term “minimal”?
The idea of minimal has taken up a negative connotation, also because most people ignore the real meaning of the word. Some time ago, there was an article in a sports magazine stating that the match was minimal, meaning that nothing had happened. Minimal is, instead, when everything takes place within the essential, when every element is charged with tension. Minimal – if we really want to use this term is a way of interpreting the world which belonged also to the Egyptians and to other civilizations and which has always existed.

Why are the Nineties marked by minimalism?
During that period, in a process of alternation of cycles represented by fashions and driven by the fashion world itself – which uses marketing to determine the alternation of tastes -, at one point it was also the turn of minimalism. It sprang from the process of practicing a style rather than through processes charged with a specific message. In my case, I was designing according to minimal criteria even before it became a fashion, I still do and I’ll continue doing so also when it won’t be fashionable anymore.

You don’t seem to like the term “minimal”. So how would you call it?
Simple and elegant; attaining simplicity is a complicated process and this quest reveals the elegance of shapes. Take for instance the “cube” chair designed by architect Le Corbusier in 1928. That object is perfectly simple and elegant. It is a forever modern chair, just like the designs produced by another architect, Mies Van De Rohe, capable perhaps of attaining the same timelessness of ancient Egyptian works.

What is the relation between shape and function in Claudio Silvestrin’s architecture?
My work is based on the quest of a perfect shape, and then I try to fulfill a function through that shape. We all have our own idea about what comfort means and each one of these ideas has a functional expression of its own. I do not pursue the de-contextualization 
of objects as an artist typically would. In order to express an idea, an artist can and should afford to design a table that is twenty meters high, useless. Albeit fulfilling the object’s function, in my projects I try to suggest a pleasant, elementary shape which aims at being abstract rather than the expression of its mere function.