por Annamaria Prandi
Abstract
The article intertwines the work and biography of Cini Boeri, passed away a few months ago, in a story that highlights her role of feminist ante litteram in the history of Italian architecture and society.
Cini Boeri left us on September 9th 2020. She was an architect with a long and brilliant career, and a woman with great charisma. The reason she is an architect we are all familiar with, is because she knew how to be a woman of her time and environment, but also because she knew how to free herself from these limitations and look to the future. And this was possible thanks to a heightened sensibility when it came to inserting life into architecture, using an attention to detail, a broadening of perspective, and seemingly small yet incisive insights into the life of both individuals and society as a whole. This consideration of the needs of those who would inhabit her spaces, her ability to understand, support and anticipate changes in the various spheres of society, be it the individual, that of the family, or the collective, is what gives originality to her most significant projects. Practical, playful, intimate spaces, extremely well-considered spaces for needs that are never spoken out loud, such as dream and introspection.
Being a woman means imagining the project with a feminine sensibility, in terms of its aesthetic, functional and qualitative aspects, and also in terms of what it will produce when fully experienced and how it will last over time. We must, indeed, remember that the architecture that surrounds us and contains human life can help us live better. When that project, however, never reminds us whether we are woman or man.[1]
Maria Cristina Mariani Dameno, known affectionately as Cini (from picinin, a Milanese term that means ‘tiny’) for being the youngest of three siblings, was born in Milan to a middle-class family in 1924. Her mother, who Cini herself remembered as being emotionally fragile but enormously influential, educated her children in the ways of freedom of thought and anti-conformism. Her paternal figures were ambiguous, yet affectionate nevertheless. Cini was raised by both an adoptive father, who was present and tenderhearted, and a biological one, complex and charismatic, who followed her throughout her childhood but only revealed who he was later on.
In 1943, to escape the bombing, her family took refuge, like many others from Milan, on Lake Maggiore. During these months of anxiety and long walks, she sometimes found herself in conversation with Giuseppe De Finetti, an important exponent of Italian rationalist architecture.
Cini revealed that she had just enrolled at the Politecnico University in Milan to him, but she did not find encouragement for her choice. Instead, De Finetti terrified her with the difficulties of that all-consuming profession, one that was too hard, more suited to men.
We can understand De Finetti’s warning, given the cultural context of the 1940s. Italy, which has always been a traditional country closely entwined to Catholic Church, was emerging from twenty years of Fascism, which, in its turns, had relegated women to the home. It is worth remembering how Mussolini summarily dismissed the issue in 1927: Women must obey. This is not artificial, it is fact. Have women ever, over the course of all these centuries, created architecture? I ask her to build me a shed, not a temple. But she cannot. She is foreign to architecture, which is the synthesis of all arts, and therefore, indicative of her fate.
De Finetti’s words were only the first in a long line of dissuasions that marked Cini Boeri’s life, often offered in a paternal fashion by people close to her. Not only did they serve to galvanise her resolve, but they testify to the difficulty faced by an entire generation of women trying to assert themselves in their own right, in various professions in the period immediately after the war.
During those long months by the lake, she became a courier for the partisans. This is where she met Renato Boeri, a medical student and commander of the brigade. The two fell in love and married at the end of the war. Their witnesses were Ferruccio Parri and Raffaele Cadorna, historic protagonists in the struggle for liberation and Italy’s future political landscape. Upon their return to Milan on April 25th 1945, they found a city mutilated by war but filled with enthusiasm for the future. It was in this ambiance that Cini Boeri returned to study Architecture at Milan’s Politecnico university. The teaching was still affected by fascist rhetoric, which made her reticent to engage. Nevertheless, Cini graduated in 1951 with Piero Portaluppi. Waiting for her outside with her husband was her son, Sandro, just a few months old.
During the two decades that followed, Cini and her husband were at the centre of Milan’s cultural life. At that time, Milan was an undoubtedly lively city. A city to which Cini Boeri had always felted, deeply, belonging, and which she never left. One could say that her whole life revolved around the Piazza Sant’Ambrogio.
I entered Piazza Sant’Ambrogio as a child, holding my mother’s hand, and I never left it. I grew up in a brick house annexed to the Basilica complex where my father worked. Later, I moved to the other side of the piazza, to a house designed by Asnago and Vender. I opened my studio next door.[2]
The dual souls of Milan - one entrepreneurial, the other, intellectual – met in the bars, theatres and bookshops. The most hard-up artists and writers, such as Piero Manzoni and Nanda Vigo, Luciano Bianciardi, and Lucio Fontana, would meet at the Bar Jamaica. The Piccolo Teatro, founded by Giorgio Strehler and Giorgio Grassi, became the hub for many architects and people working in the theatre. But it was in the bookshop in Via Manzoni that belonged to Vasco Aldrovandi, known to all by his partisan battle name, Al, and a very close friend of Cini’s, that everyone was welcome, Italians and foreigners alike. The bookshop was the city’s real cultural centre, a left-wing club that could rely on its cultural hegemony. This world was still entirely male but through which Cini Boeri moved with ease, aware nonetheless that the role of women was generally a peripheral, rather than a central one. In an interview, she recalled being often referred to as Mrs. Boeri, with a self-righteousness that glossed over her professional career and choosing instead to emphasize only her social position, always subordinate to her husband. Mrs. Boeri is so lovely or One eats so well at Mrs. Boeri’s house is the mirror of a progressive left that was only partially so. Or like that time in which Gregotti said as, invited alongside her to hold a conference: “I will now pass you over to Mrs. Boeri”, de facto removing any recognition of her as an architect. This attitude accompanied her throughout her life, and one to which she reacted with politeness and sarcasm. Her much-desired reputation would only come at the end: interviews, publications, and prizes such as the Compasso d’Oro for her life’s work, received at the age of 87.
But let’s go back to the beginning. Following a brief apprenticeship with Gio Ponti – whose natural affection was accompanied by clumsy attempts to dissuade her from pursuing a career in architecture, instead of motivating her towards the gentler arts of design and painting – Cini Boeri started with Marco Zanuso. The projects she worked on at the studio suited her and explored female psychology. One such project was the home for single mothers in Lorenteggio (1955). The subject was delicate: often the young mothers coming from a hostile environment where they were isolated, a kind of suffering that sounded like punishment to them. The institute that welcomed them offered to lift them from the degradation and ghettoization they would otherwise have experienced. In this project, Cini Boeri attempted to understand the state of mind of these women, along with their children, offering them welcoming spaces, highly colourful interiors, furniture organized to design the space, and a little privacy, family warmth and dignity. This attention to the social context as to the psychology of the inhabitants, to interpersonal dynamic, to a sphere that is both practical and imaginative, are themes that run through later projects, particularly those that involve habitation.
These were the boom years. Milan had the highest rate of female employment in Italy. Though, these were overwhelmingly office workers, factory workers or, shop assistants, all young and, most importantly, all single, because in the early 1960s, marriage could lead to the legal termination of a woman’s work contract. Female architects, magistrates, lawyers, professionals in general were few and far between. They aimed for economic independence, but were not interested in social demands. It was Franca Helg who persuaded her to open her studio before she became expendable in Zanuso’s. And it was he who, after twelve years of intense collaboration, would be the most spiteful upon hearing of her departure: You don’t have the balls to work on your won. It was 1963. Cini Boeri opened her very own architecture studio in Piazza Sant’Ambrogio.
A few years later, her brother-in-law commissioned her for a holiday house on the Maddalena island. Crucially, she had to identify where best to build it, so Cini left for the island, rented a small motorboat, and circumnavigated the whole thing, finding the ideal location in the bay of Abbatoggia. It is a remote site, with a poignant, wild beauty and granite rocks fading into the sea. The house built was known as La Rotonda and it appears as an elegant yet unusual villa overlooking the sea, with its circular form and extremely sophisticated layout. A cluster of rooms for the family and one for guests, each distinct and autonomous, wrap around a central patio that, protected from the wind, acts as a meeting space. In this first house, we find a leitmotif for all of her later residential creations, and which finds its pinnacle in the residence that Cini Boeri decided to build in the same bay for herself and her three children.
She had recently separated from her husband, and the layout for what will in time become the buen retiro for the Boeri family, was very much informed by the family’s new requirements. Cini built a modern home for a modern family, in which she firmly assured the autonomy of the inhabitants alongside the joy of living together. While La Rotonda has a particular elegance, the Bunker (as they refer to it on Maddalena, due to its severe appearance and unusual dark grey color) is angular and sits like a foreign object on the precipitous granite slope that leads down to the beach. It has a square layout, with four bedrooms with bathrooms in the corners, each featuring a door to the outside that would allow the inhabitants to move around discretely, and another leading to the central living room. This is the space where people come together like a Roman atrium, where family life takes place. It is a very elaborate space, built with steps and seats, and a double view: one towards the kitchen and the dining room, which look out to the mountains, and towards the sea with an enormous glass wall that looks out over a patio. It is an introverted house that protects family intimacy and symbolizes its values. The house appears as an alien body on the beach as, perhaps, Cini Boeri to many.
1969 saw the creation of the Casa nel Bosco, close to Varese. The layout of the house, a holiday home, was broken up to avoid cutting down any birch trees in the surrounding forest, in this way, creating a series of autonomous bodies to be used by various members of the family and guests. The spaces feed one’s own intimacy, with large windows looking out onto the landscape from which to look into the distance and perhaps lose oneself, metaphorically speaking. A fluid construction, not rigid like the square house on Maddalena, articulated internally with different levels and sliding wooden walls that divide up the spaces. And, as always, there is a large, central room. Perhaps it is better described as centripetal due to the force it exerts as an aggregational element, as we can see in its layout and in the arrangement of its furniture, with multiple sofas laid out in a circle, inviting the house’s inhabitants to engage one another in conversation.
It was in the 1970s that Cini Boeri designed the design objects that made her famous: from the three versions of the Bobo armchair (the young, mature, and psychoanalytical versions) to the iconic Botolo and Botolino chairs, not forgetting Lunario, Gradual System, the Serpentone, the Pecorelle and Strips, the sofa bed that won her the first Compasso d'Oro.
These are sacrilegious objects, of which the Serpentone is perhaps the most emblematic. A sofa made by meter remains in design’s collective imagination since 1971, when a long grey serpent was carried by hand through Milan’s San Babila district as a collective event in an enormous showroom.
We used a ductile, poor material, exactly as it comes out of the mold. We made a serpent on which to rest and that costs very little. This is what I asked of Arflex, presenting the prototype, which had been handmade in my studio. It was asking a lot of the company that had produced the Bobo five years earlier with the pride of someone who has an intelligent yet inexperienced child. The Serpentone was created for a public whose habits of having sofas and seats in velvet had already been upturned, who knows how to look at necessity and not the superfluous, who has traded in its ties for blue jeans. I’m thinking of the young because the old – not those who are so legally but have chosen that state – would completely misunderstand this chair and the ideas behind it.[3]
She proposed we use and never possess. After an incredible marketing launch, Arflex decided not to put it into production, and the Serpentone remained a prototype. An article written by Cini Boeri in Ottagono[4] on the change of pace needed by the by-then consolidated furniture industry is still famous today. Courage is required if one has decided not simply to follow the market but to educate on a more informed usage and way of living, based on the freedom of use rather than property. And she cites Karl Marx: Production not only produces an object for the subject, but also a subject for the object, and provides not only a material for the need, but a need for the material.
In 1980, a small design manual was published, written by Cini Boeri, called “The human dimensions of the house”[5]. It explores the theme of minimal habitable space and poses the question of whether the house should adapt to a changed society. It also attempts to understand how the choices that inform an expensive apartment block can also be applied to a cheaper one.
A few years later, in 1986, a sizable exhibition curated by Mario Bellini opened at the Milan Triennale, entitled “The Domestic Project. Human Houses: Archetypes and Prototypes”. The exhibition had two parallel sections, one theoretical, which ran through the history of domestic living in the Western world, and the other entirely project-based. Very few women were invited to take part, one of whom was a very young Zaha Hadid. Cini Boeri presented the project for a house for a couple. She interpreted the dimensions of the house as psychological dimensions. Rather than planning a model based on the fusion of two individuals, she offers one based on their autonomy. In it, spaces for sharing and those for moments of individual reflection are alternated. The couple must always have the possibility, even in a small house, to exercise their free choice to live together.
Without the two individuals having to meld together, to blend into the traditional concept of the family. I separated the two daily lives, giving them a name. I projected a film on German choreographer Pina Bausch that featured many excerpts from the Kontakthof show, where the dance play explores the light and shadows of the relationship between men and women, the fragility of this relationship.[6]
At the time, several newspapers wrote that Cini Boeri was a wedding killer.
In actual fact, the project confirmed once more that, in the life of a couple, sharing must absolutely be followed by independence, and that family is not symbiosis but union of autonomies.
Any approach to the house, independently of the economic value attributed to it, would do well to keep the following in mind:
- it is usually two people who decide to live together, and it is right that they remain two without reciprocal urges for fusion and mimesis;
- the individual freedom of both is the only value guaranteed to ensure a good, or at least sufficient, understanding that lasts longer than three months;
- the privacy of certain times, actions, moments of work or relaxation ensures reciprocal respect for both people;
- the possibility of maintaining some of one’s own life for oneself, without giving it entirely to one’s partner, favours the independent development of both people and their grasp on reality, and leaves living the other parts of one’s life together as matters of desire and free choice;
- imposing total parity of responsibility in the management of the home avoids situations of despondency and irritation that can sometimes lead to reciprocal hatred.[7]
Cini Boeri offered new spaces to individuals and, often, new interpretations of spaces that already existed, as when she made the kitchen a shared responsibility, the living room a corner of creativity, and the bedroom a place for dream and love. If these descriptions might make us smile today, the idea of a house or a life considered differently continues, nevertheless, to be compelling. We are left asking ourselves whether or not we have been able to secure ourselves a room of our own.[8]
References
[1] - Cini Boeri, in Guccione, 2012.
[2] - Cini Boeri, in Avogadro, 2004.
[3] - Cini Boeri, 1971.
[4] - Cini Boeri, 1973.
[5] - Cini Boeri, 1980.
[6] - Cini Boeri, in Avogadro, 2004.
[7] - Cino Boeri, 1978.
[8] - A woman must have money and a room of her own, if she is to write fiction, in Woolf, A Room of One's Own, Hogarth Press, 1929.
Author : Annamaria Prandi graduated in Architecture from Istituto Universitario di Venezia.
Since 2006 she has been leading together with Andrea Vescovini Ludens, office of architecture based in Italy. Since 2017 she has been teaching and researching as scientific assistant at the Chair of Architecture and Design Jan De Vylder at ETH Zurich, where she is currently editor of the book series Carrousel Confessions Confusion and of the lecture series Seven Questions together with Jan De Vylder.
She is member of the Parity Group ETH Zurich.
Annamaria lives and works in Zurich, CH.
Contact: prandi@arch.ethz.ch
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