Cino Zucchi

Architect; Urban Designer; Landscape Designer / Italy / CZA — Cino Zucchi Architetti

Cino Zucchi’s Book List

Johann Heinrich Füssli, a Swiss painter friend of William Blake, said once: “In art many beautiful things are born by chance, but are conserved by choice.” The same happens in life, or in our intellectual development. Encountering knowledge is like encountering love; the books that have been meaningful to us are more often “found” than searched for, but the long-lasting impression they make on our mind or soul is caused by inner resonances. Sometimes they are sitting on the shelf right next to the one we were looking for, sometimes we are just inspired by their whimsical title in someone else’s bibliography, sometimes they are passed on by a friend as a wrap of dope. In our mind, the books we read form an elaborate geography of towns, valleys, cities; we love to visit new sites, but also to go back from time to time to places we love, seeing how much our memory has deformed their squares and their alleys to become a meaningful backdrop of our own wandering paths.

3 books
Stephen Jay Gould

A marvelous collection of articles on the haphazard lines of evolution, and the equally haphazard paths of scientific discovery. Plain language and sophisticated thought by one of the last scientists with deep humanistic interests. Gould narrates the story of the QWERTY keypad as it were that of a mollusk of the “Cambrian explosion.”

Paul Valéry

Originally a poet, Paul Valéry decided to quit poetry and write about almost every field of human experience, revealing himself one of the sharpest minds of the last century. Degas Dance Drawing, Tel Quel, Rhumbs, and the endless quest of his Quaderns are among the writings that primarily touched my intellect. In Monsieur Teste, Valéry tries to present the picture of a “pure intelligence,” interested in its own mechanisms more that in the object of that intelligence. The Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci, one of his earliest essays, goes way beyond the argument of its title, advocating for a unity between the phenomenological level and the search for deep structures in nature and design.

Douglas Hofstadter

An artificial intelligence genius, best known for his Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979), Hofstadter is able to create connections among areas belonging to the most diverse regions of human experience. His plea to carry to the limit small deviations from well-known patterns to reach new insights (in the essay in Metamagical Themas called “Variations on a Theme as the Crux of Creativity”) could be taken as a manifesto for reuniting knowledge and discovery, culture and experimentation.

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