Opening image: Alberto Ponis, sketch of Stazzo Pulcheddu, 1975

On Monday, May 4, Phase 2 began. At 6:30 p.m. I get off work and go for a walk in Trotter Park, which has finally reopened. There are many people, even some kids playing football in the main square. The police pass by and makes them stop. Somehow this diary ends there. 
This new phase gives back some freedoms, turns a blind eye to other things. It is not a real turning point but a relaxation of quarantine policies. Are we going to have a new virus spike in 15 days? Judging by the families walking around without masks and the teens draining yet another Negroni between towers of empty plastic cups, maybe we will.
(AS)

 I haven't been out yet. Everyone keeps telling me “come out, come out it’ll be good for you!”: Alessandro, my mom, my colleagues, my friends. In these first days of Phase 2 I noticed from my balcony that more and more people are crowding the sidewalks, driving their cars with loud music, or on their bikes with shopping bags hanging from the handlebars. 
I feel like when, as a child, my grandmother used to wet my legs and arms with sea water to get me familiar with its temperature, to convince me – finally – to take a bath.
It took me a while but then I ended up staying in the water all day. 
Soon I’ll be out and it’ll be another story.
(GR)

In these two months we have put together ideas, presented projects, talked to people. Thanks to these voices, we have told a unique living condition since Domus was born. There will be new things to tell, new challenges to face. This diary ends with the end of quarantine, of isolation. The fear remains, together with the emergency, but also the desire to build a better future. For that, however, we'll need another diary. 
(GR + AS)

Since living coincides with virtuality, the home space understood as a dimension of the spirit has become superfluous: that’s a place that no longer lends itself to living or living together. Perhaps living tires. Let’s make a clean sweep then, and throw away all the objects that we no longer caress, those that are not part of our tears, whose origin is unknown, even if they followed us in our moves, those that we would never take with us in our graves.

We only keep the objects that will be there even after us: the inevitable objects. So we will be able to reconstruct the lost sense of living as a mystery of Beauty, making the house a place of contemplation of a new springtime, cleansed of the fine dust of amnesia.
Starting again from Beauty we go back to “living poetically” and we will be able to face the economic and social bradyseism of the post-pandemic period with an imperceptibly brighter soul.

Mario Trimarchi is an architect and designer

Alberto and Annarita were in Palau when they answered the phone: they are working on the arrangement of the studio’s archive, a work that started almost 10 years ago, they tell me. They take me with them on a virtual tour of the house they live in, which is “a building on the edge and empty inside”. A house that gently slopes from one courtyard to another, passing through the garden, punctuated by small terraces populated by fig trees, rosemary and papyrus, up to the reed that fronts onto the sea.

The master, a Genoese native and inveterate traveller, arrived in Sardinia after studying in Florence and working for Ernő Goldfinger and Denys Lasdun in London in the 1960s. Right there he was “struck by the urban landscape, the bright red of the letterboxes and the blue doors of the houses”. It was with his artist friend Enzo Apicella that some commissions arrived in Sardinia, during the years of the building boom, which “stopped too late”. From the first house in Palau (published in Domus n.419, 1964) – white painted, a colour he never used again in Sardinia – to Porto Rafael and Costa Paradiso, there are countless houses designed by Alberto and his studio. Here they stopped, creating an archive of houses and ways of living over time. Alberto himself tells me he feels privileged to be there, since little has changed for them: they carry on working on the archive even during lockdown.

(GR)

Alberto Ponis is an architect, Annarita Zalaffi is an engineer.

[About Instagram] “I mean I got rid of it because I could see people posting pictures of themselves with their butts hanging out and saying “This quarantine sucks, I miss Ibiza”. I would do some conceptual work on it, putting the photo of this young lady on one side and the photo of the death toll of that day on the other. I don’t know how a person in his right state of mind or also, in his right state of heart can think of posting such nonsense when the world is falling apart, when even the heads of state are talking nonsense, when the Prime Minister of England speaks of herd immunity, when the Queen of England speaks to the State after 25 years, when Donald Trump says “inject a dose of disinfectant.” Well, if you can’t find better things to do than say “I miss Ibiza”, as far as I’m concerned, I take you, your Instagram and Ibiza, pack them up and throw them into the ocean.”

[About love affairs] “The pandemic forces us to reconsider the terms of our relationship with feelings. For obvious facts: who is single is much lonelier, who is in the family must live this dimension in a much more cohesive way. Even in the future, as long as the situation remains as it is, you will have to decide at most to form a cluster of one or two friends and ensure the safety on the serological level, so as not to hurt each other. So, let’s say that love declinations have returned to the foreground, because the whole hedonistic-seductive, multi-Grinder and multi-Tinder phase moved to the background. Now on these social networks there is a disclaimer, “we continue to exist, but you are requested not to meet”. It is a conceptual work of art in itself. Unfortunately, someone decides to meet anyway. These people have all my reprehensible disdain, because whoever puts people’s health at risk is a criminal”.  
(GR)

Francesco Vezzoli is an Italian artist.

Michel Houllebecq is a French writer.

The book Condominy was born in a special context, from the work of a multidisciplinary group – the artists Cristina Pancini and Paola Gaggiotti with the architects casatibuonsante – and the young people from the Progetto Giovani (Youth Project) of the paediatric oncology department of the IRCCS Foundation, the National Cancer Institute of Milan. The young patients, who are between 16 and 24 years old, are forced to isolate themselves because of their immune system condition. Together with the group, they have given shape to their ideal rooms in a “large collective living space”: a condominium (virtual and real) made of shared imagery and virtual exchanges. Each one has designed the shape, imagined the possible actions and views, decided the floor of their own room in that condominium. Matteo Davide, one of the residents, says that “it is important to learn how to be alone. You will discover things about yourself that you didn’t know yet, and if you can feel good about yourself, you will enjoy life better. That’s what isolation taught me”. A reading that could teach us something about determination and imagination when isolation is necessary.

You can request the pdf of the book for free through Instagram or by sending an email to condominy@gmail.com. On YouTube you can listen to Condominy’s playlist.
(GR)

The end. This quarantine seems to be coming to an end.
I hear enthusiast friends, excited to get back at work, I listen to the voices of those who wait for the workweek with unprecedented joy: a way to get back to normality, to something that feels like a normal day. A today that projects itself into the future, as all todays should do.
And then there’s me. Or rather, and then there's us: the show business workers. Several of us who still don’t know if work will start again, how and when it will do so.

Today is May 1st. It’s the International Workers’ Day. I’ve always liked this day, it was sunny, there was music, there were friends. Now I also like the beginning of our Constitution, “Italy is a democratic Republic founded on labour”. In the past I hated this beginning, I used to think about work and read it in terms of productivity only. Now, that Article 1 has become a portrait of faces for me. Faces that engage themselves, that seek, that give a value to their day, risking something. Investing time, effort, sweat, pain. Choices.

Today is May 1st and my face is not in the picture I see.

Francesco Bressan, actor and performer, deals with theatre, dramaturgy and performing art. He is part of the duo Bressan/Romondia.

Lorenzo Sizzi and Müge Yürüten are two young architects. At the beginning of the quarantine they decided to face this period together. And they realized that one of the most stressful moments is when they return home, because “cleaning has to be done as soon as you cross the threshold and, above all, it is not enough just to wash your hands”. Hence In-Soap, a project in which “soap itself becomes a space”, placed right at the entrance of the house.

The project is based on a “buffer zone” divided into two areas. The first is protected by a membrane, while the second opens towards the inside of the house. Everything is designed in order to adapt and change according to the type and size of the entrance of each house. In-Soap participated in Fountains of Hygiene, which we have talked about here.
(AS)

“I have to bring you a book, I’ll come on Friday around noon. I’ll stop by on my way home from the studio”, tells me A. on the phone, “unless you don’t mind”. I tell him it’s okay, I really mean it. I jokingly add that “we don’t have to exchange effusions anyway!”.
We laugh.

That Friday my friend A. arrived by bike, we met in front of the doorway: I was in the hall, he was on the sidewalk. He was wearing the ordnance mask. When we meet, we usually give each other two ritual kisses on the cheeks, but now it is obviously unthinkable to do so. We were both unsure what we should or shouldn’t do. We overcame the impasse with a pinch of fatalism, imitating the same gesture in the air, and exchanging a smile. He told me about the book, and then we said goodbye.

After 50 days stuck at home, A. was the first person I saw at close range, except for my roommate. I realize that for 50 days, I’ve been thinking about my front door as an insurmountable limit. I only went out a couple of times to buy groceries in early March, before using the delivery services. Sometimes when I’m on my balcony I have the impression that my skin almost burns on contact with city air.

It was nice and strange to see A., it was also the first time I tested myself in managing the distance of my body from the others. Redefining a new proxemics will be less than obvious.
Ah, the relatives!
(GR)

In Italy, May 4th was expected to be the beginning of the so-called “phase 2” of the lockdown. Actually, considering the number of liberties that are given back, it seems more like a phase 1.1 to many people; in the meantime, I tried to make a list of the things that we will remember and the things that it will be worth not forgetting about, of these terrible and incredible days together.

It is not something you do alone. I asked a few friends and colleagues to help me. And I would like you all to participate.

1. The tape strips outside and inside the stores to mark the “acceptable” distance between people;
2. The Travis Scott concert on Fortnite;
3. The photo of the “socially distanced” demonstration in Israel;

4. Washing your hands constantly, until they hurt;
5. The shoes left outside the house;
6. When I went out for jogging and then they banned it;
7. The first week when we were all out on our balconies, then we acted as if they never existed.
8. All these live videos on Instagram, YouTube, streaming, people who stream them all day long in general;
9. The photos of Mattarella and Pope Francis;

10. Coronavirus memes (“adopted” by Marianna Guernieri);

11. Birds singing like mad at all hours of the day (also Marianna);

12. Homemade bread with sourdough, “smash hit” ingredient of the lockdown (Raffaele Vertaldi);

13. The sun bench in the communal garden where I had never gone before (Loredana Mascheroni);

14. At the supermarket, opening vegetable bags wearing gloves and mask (also Loredana);

15. Breakfast every morning, a habit lost for years (Romina Totaro);

16. Parked cars covered with poplar pollen (also Romina);

17. The silence, so deep that at night it seems to be in the countryside (Simona Bordone);
18. The educational advertisements at bus stops (Simona);

19. The e-mails on Google Classroom for online classes of primary schools and kindergarten (Giulia Guzzini);
20. The seconds punctuated by the apps for training at home (Giulia);
21. The messy hair due to the closed barbershops;
22. Whole weekends spent in a 2 square meters balcony (Cristina Moro)
23. The adrenaline of Saturday morning for going to the newsstand (Cristina);
24. The photos of the man sunbathing on the beach in Rimini surrounded by the police (Nicola Peluchetti)

25. The “boomers” who meet for everything on Zoom: the “zoomers” (Sara Sagrati)
26. @lebimbedigiuseppeconte
27. The dark sky at night, without airliners (Elena Sommariva)

You want to add something to the list?
I’d love to!
Write me on IG @alessandroscarano20 TW @a_scarano or scarano@edidomus.it

A Day in the Life – April 18th in the fateful year of 2020, is the title (quite Beatles-esque) of the video that Marcio created for this Diary. It was Saturday 18th of April when he recorded his actions and the details of his everyday life, describing them through his voice.
(GR)

Marcio Kogan is a Brazilian architect and founder of Studio MK27, based in São Paulo.

I go out to the grocery store and at the traffic light on Viale Monza there is just me and an Enjoy, the red Cinquecento that symbolises Made in Italy car-sharing. Until two months ago there was a river full of cars. I get home and I receive an email from Lynx & co, in which they ask me for an interview. It is a car brand that uses the “Netflix model” instead of the classic twenty-first century dealership. And what happened to Hellbiz and Lime electric scooters?

Before the Coronavirus broke out, the sharing economy seemed the basis for redesigning our lives in the future, especially in the city. Will we return to share after the emergency, will we still trust Uber or Airbnb? Some say no. Actually, the new economy expert April Rinne thinks this could be a new beginning instead. In a long article on Medium she argues that community and virtuous sharing will survive, that of Airbnb which provides homes for the medical staff, and perhaps, that of underpaid drivers will collapse.
(AS)

The group of architects, photographers and graphic designers of Fōndaco works between Toronto, Milan and Berlin. In order to understand how the rhythm of their daily lives was changing between work, relaxation and calls, in the week from 24 to 30 March they decided to collect data on their everyday activities.
The result was “The time of quarantine”, a handmade data visualisation, in which they transformed the single activities into small graphic symbols. These almost seem to belong to an archaic forgotten alphabet but, for them, “the inspiration comes from the visual musical scores for Ambient 1: Music for Airports, an album by Brian Eno and Robert Wyatt from 1978”. The symbols are distributed on a pentagram that actually has 7 lines, and each one stands for a member of Fōndaco.
(GR)

Fōndaco is a multidisciplinary group based in three different cities: Milan, Toronto and Berlin.

“The house where I grew up is big, and it's the same house I'm living in during quarantine. My mother, my father and me. The size and arrangement of the apartment allows you to isolate yourself in your own space without necessarily interacting with each other. If I had to redesign my house today, how would I do it? My routine moves between rooms, doors and windows, drawing a completely different plan. But if my house has “shrunk”, my private space sometimes comes out of the walls. At night, when everyone is asleep, the porch of the building becomes an extension of my room. It is my true moment of privacy: there I am. All alone”.

Beatrice Balducci is a PhD student in Architecture at the Polytechnic University of Milan, where she deals with emergency and security.

Lina comes from Beirut, but has lived and worked in the French capital for years, near Place de la République. Her house and studio are 2 minutes’ walk from each other: “I feel like I’m guarding the studio. It’s awkward, I’m always very busy, all day long, even if everything seems to be still”, she tells me. It’s in that short stretch of road that the architect recognises small changes in the way nature relates to the city and inspired by this vision she created her series of illustrations.

“We have always imposed confinement on other species and now that we are the ones who are confined, I find the way nature is taking over the spaces of the city very poetic”. We discussed about Paris and Beirut, about their profound difference: the first with the Haussmannian tradition of extreme control over the natural element, while the second is the result of the stitching of different urban plans, in whose cracks creep ruins and nature. Paris is therefore a completely eccentric point of view, from which to observe this renegotiation of the urban space.
I ask her about how her observations will influence her architecture: she tells me that in the past decades, man have mostly seen nature as a threat rather than as an opportunity or a field of learning. This may explain why our cities have been built aggressively, embedding a feeling of violence. What she is observing in these days reinforces her feeling that the symbiotic reconciliation between the mineral city and the natural one is today, more than ever, essential.

Lina Ghotmeh is a French-Lebanese architect and founder of Lina Ghotmeh — Architecture. Stone Garden, Beirut, has been published in Domus n.1045.

ArtAway is a project that allows you to visit Italy, its cities and artistic heritage, even during the lockdown. On the one hand it exploits Google tools – Maps, Street View, Arts and Culture – and on the other, real experts who guide tourists on this virtual journey. Behind this project there is Video Sound Art, a contemporary art festival that was born in 2010, which is also a production centre. “Everything was done just in 10 days,” says Laura Lamonea of VSA. “It was easy for us because it's partly something we already do”. 


The creation of the tours, where the great tradition alternates with niche references, was the longest but easiest part, “because it was closer to our experience”, explains Laura. She mentions the example of the virtual tour in Naples with a great personality from the past, Caravaggio, and one from the present, Anish Kapoor, and the Fontanelle cemetery, something very peculiar with the tradition of the living to “adopt” the bones of the dead.

But there is also space for the unexpected, like the Chianti, where the cellars open up to contemporary art.

ArtAway was born after the proposal of a Silicon Valley product manager, Paolo Gabriele Falcone. Laura Lamonea tells us about a very concise job,: there were six people working, including the single developer who set up the whole site in a few hours. “A very cohesive group, which managed to bring out the best. Even though each one worked from his own house”. Now the intention is to take the project, “born as a reaction”, beyond quarantine.
(AS)

ArtAway is open to everyone, on prior reservation. The site is artaway.com

“The personal is political. But are we sure we still know what’s public?

The webcam, to the sound of lectures, meetings, online press conferences has moved the threshold of the concept of “home”, plunging a new border, vertical and horizontal, in the middle of our private space: a part of the domestic space has become public. 

How do you furnish this space? And above all, who decorates it?

We can think of ourselves as the only designers of a new stage of ego, setting up self-celebrating backgrounds: but this too is action-reaction, a response to a judgement we attribute to the audience.

It is habitat but above all a public space, because it is designed by several designers and by their interactions. It is the realm of the in-between by Aldo Van Eyck, today”.

Lucia Baima and Giovanni Comoglio are architects, Ph.D.; he is an architectural historian and contributor to Domus, she is a researcher at the Polytechnic of Turin.

“We think that the online platforms that enables our course to continue are working for about 1/3 of our students, while the other 2/3 would like to go back to the studio” Sandra Denicke-Polcher and Jane McAllister tell me via Zoom. Until 15 years ago their school mainly had students who were able to study full-time. “Now things have changed a lot”, says Jane “the week for an average student is very different, it is not only about focusing on the education, they must balance their work and their studies, making money and looking after their children”. 

Sandra and Jane’s design lab focuses on the revitalisation of the village of Belmonte Calabro, in Southern Italy, where they travelled to last February, right before the Coronavirus outbreak. In order to engage the students of the whole school, they have set a range of moments where they travel to Belmonte and carry out different activities with the citizens, the migrants and a network of professionals supported by the cultural association La Rivoluzione delle Seppie.
Like many others, their course was transferred on online platforms. Sandra points out that “it is a solution to a crisis, but platforms work really well – imagine if we had to shut the university!”. Rita Elvira Adamo adds that “these platforms give you the possibility to go on teaching” but, nevertheless, every student reacts differently.

But how does teaching architecture change when it becomes digital? Materials, such as drawings, models and mock-ups make it hard to transfer the experience of a design studio through the screen.
This becomes particularly explicit at The Cass, known for its practical approach, and where the figure of the architect is not at all conceived as a deus ex machina: “we attract students that want to learn through making and that are interested in our socially oriented ethos.”

They tell me about their students, about the fact that this year’s group is particularly well-integrated. Most of them, they tell me, really depend on contact with peers, an interaction that Sandra and Jane try to encourage even via the online platforms: they work around their models in a communal way, producing them and discussing them together. Inclusion is a value that starkly emerges from our conversation – even if the word itself has never been pronounced – and they tell me that some students might benefit from the flexibility of online education. “There are very good things that are coming out of the digital, but we think we have to keep a very watchful eye, so we don’t reduce this kind of person-to-person interface. If we were to project forward, the idea of a combination might work well!”

Sandra Denicke-Polcher and Jane McAllister teach the Undergraduate Studio 3 and Postgraduate Unit 6 at The Sir John Cass School of Art, Architecture and Design at the London Metropolitan University.
Rita Elvira Adamo is a PhD candidate at the Università Mediterranea di Reggio Calabria and academic facilitator at The Cass, MET London. She is founder of the cultural association La Rivoluzione delle Seppie.

Giulia Dal Bon and Camilla Spadaro are two students of the Brera Academy; Giulia studies graphics, Camilla art and new technologies. When the quarantine was not yet effective, but there was already a different atmosphere in Milan, they decided to describe it in a project that would integrate the photographic documentation of those days, rigorously in black and white, with drawings made with digital techniques. These images are the final result: A different fog.

Manuel Cervantes has two studios in Mexico City, or maybe it is more appropriate to say that its studio is divided into two parts. The first, in chronological terms, is more closely related to production and functioning; the second is a space located in his own house. It is in this second location that the conversations with clients take place: according to Manuel, holding these conversations in a domestic environment is “a way for the client to understand what we do and who we are, as well as my values and my understanding of things.” For the architect, these dialogues are held in a convivial atmosphere, sometimes sharing a meal or sipping coffee.

By the time the Coronavirus arrived in Mexico, these meetings were suspended or transferred to digital platforms and, says Manuel, “it is clearly impossible to offer this kind of experience of space and interaction through Zoom.”

(GR)

Manuel Cervantes owns the studio that bears his name, based in Mexico City.

I’ve had an intense relationship with my home-studio for many years. We are very much alike because even my studio cannot conceive of a division between architecture and life. Everything must flow continuously. From the bedroom, a door leads directly to the main room of the studio where our staff used to work before the quarantine.  Now they draw remotely and the door is always open, and so even this last faint filter has vanished.

There is an ironic photo about my relationship with the house/studio: it represents me as Monsieur Hulot, living in all his spaces at the same time.

During this quarantine, with the slow passing of the days, I had the impression that the provocation of that photography was evolving, until it reached a suggestive and unexpected fulfilment.

I believe, in fact, that in the next few days my fate will finally come true and I that will transform myself into my own house. After all, it’s only fair. Isn’t it perhaps the destiny of the artist to coincide?

Flaubert had already warned us: “Madame Bovary c’est moi” (“I am Madame Bovary”).

Filippo Bricolo is an architect. He founded Bricolo Falsarella Associati together with Francesca Falsarella in 2003, he teaches at the Polytechnic University of Milan, at the campus of Mantua.

Every night, the Italian Protezione Civile communicates up-to-date data about the contagion. It does so with a primitive table that seems to be printed directly from an excel sheet, the data arranged in separate columns with bright colours. It lists the number of hospitalized, how many in intensive care, then the self-insulated and healed.There are many doubts about how much this data can be useful to give us a clear idea of the contagion. And then the number of deaths, which according to a recent Istat study could be many more.  As of April 10, 2020, 18,849 people officially died in Italy due to the Coronavirus, according to the Civil Defence. Of these, more than 10,000 here in Lombardy.

One of them was my father, and what you will hear below is the story of how the always fluctuating space between us became, suddendly, infinite.
(AS)

Stephanie and Georg are the founders of the practice Davidson Rafailidis, both teach at university - she teaches design in Toronto, he architecture in Buffalo - and, as well as partners, they are a couple: they live in a small cottage outside the city with their two young children, Max and LouLou.

“What I think, especially as a mother and as a woman, is that I realised that I learned to ‘be in architecture’ by not talking about my children. I’ve really learned to separate being a mother from being an architect, but right now it’s just impossible". That’s why Stephanie started making a series of collages in which she represents the ‘circus’ (as she describes it) that is around her every day: “my children only know me as a mother,” she says. LouLou and Max insinuate themselves into her work, between the online lectures of the university and the work of the studio. They are still too small to realize what is happening in the world today, provided that what is happening does not leave everyone disoriented.

She tells me that they wake up cheerful and energetic while, as many adults do these days, they find it hard to sleep having to manage their anxieties. If the two little ones at home need anything, they spontaneously go to her. Stephanie’s collages portray this clash of moods: the children play to the rhythm of “the floor is lava!” between pieces of furniture that the studio has designed and objects of their home space. She, on the other hand, portrays herself adjusting the weights of the lines of the drawings on Rhino or AutoCad, or while she is giving an online lesson. Stephanie tells me, “Something that stabilizes us a bit at this really unstable time is knowing that many people feel the same way, even though we all respond differently.”
(GR)

Stephanie Davidson and Georg Rafailidis founded Davidson Rafailidis in 2008, they met at the AA School of Architecture. Their project Big Space Little Space will be published in the May issue of Domus, n. 1046.