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
J. J. Coulton

Throw away all theories and speculations about the “golden ratio”: this is one of the few serious books about design methods in ancient Greece based on archaeological evidence.

Bernard Rudofsky

A healthy antidote to self-centered design attitudes! 

Christopher Alexander

Before his spectacular shift from obscure mathematical formulas to folk design, which generated his other masterwork, A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander gave us deep illuminations on the difference between traditional craftsmanship, based on the repetition of forms, and modern design attitudes, founded on the division between “method” and “result.” A post-functionalist insight into form-making.

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