Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Eleonora interviews
studio O
Beijing,
September 2016
Eleonora
Nam
e
C: Cristiano,
Bianchi
E:
Enrico
EF:
Ef
Where are you from and where are
you going to?
C: Im from Italy, Tuscany. And I will go back
there, one day.
E: Im from Poggibonsi, a little town between Siena
and Florence.
Where am I going? For sure not back to Italy. All pther
options are pretty opened, Italy is good for retirement.
EF: I came from the ashes and I will go
back to the ashes.
What do you do for job and what did you wish for your
job to be when you
were a kid?
C: I am an architect and among the many intentions I
wrote down when I was
a kid, I heard that the police man was the most
accredited, I dont know why. In an older age, I always
E: Im an architect and I graduated ten years ago. My
mother is an architect as
well and when I was a kid, after school, she would take
me around on construction sites while checking on her work. We used to go
once a week and every time I would be so fascinated by
the workers and by seeing these people making things,
building walls, it was kind of magical. On the contrary, I
absolutely
couldnt understand what my mum was doing with all
those drawings, so one
sa
y.
EF: I think there is a very defined time. You can blur these
limits but you still
have a very clear a past. Nowadays the speed of time is
so fast that even the
perception of time changed a lot, but it is definitely there.
I started to answer your question and I feel that ii is
You live far away from your roots: that was brave. What
is your relationship
with space/distance as a person and as an architect?
C: It is very useful being so far from roots, it makes you
push your limits and
leads you to do things you were not aware you would be
able to. My experience taught me that distance can set
you free from preconception on your understanding of the world, or the schemes you used to judge
really influenced by the culture of your place of origins. But
there is also the other side of the coin which sees
migrations, integration, preservation of identity when living
together and many other complex aspects. Finally, when
far away from roots for a personal
and free choice, then I would recommend.
As from an architect point of view, it is really interesting
to learn a method in a country and apply it in a
completely diff erent place. It is the confrontation between
diff erent cultures that sometimes can lead to be nave,
when interact- ing with a culture which is impossible to
E: Being far away from roots brought me a new perception
of distance. Six
years ago I would look to Asia from Europe as somewhere
really far away. Now I fly fourteen hours to go back home
and I feel it is like taking the bus from Caochangdi to
Lama Temple. The idea of distance changed radically for
me in the last years and since when I have been living
here, I really feel the world is more compact.
Architecture is also about space and distances, there are
various specializations involved in it but in the end it is
o credo