As I thought about “rethinking happiness” over this last year, both in terms of thinking and designing, I inadvertently felt a strange sense of contradiction in the fact that the idea of living and working together with other people either in the heart of the beautiful Venetian countryside or suburbs of Milan made no great difference to me.
Indeed, I gradually came to believe that the main interest lay in the idea of somewhere linked with a sense of community, which I would have liked to talk about or possibly experience for myself. It can be thought of as a “lovely place” because the life that goes on there is full of opportunities, where people can meet together and do things together, where children can play in a safe environment, where there is greenery and where the architecture, regardless of its style, provides the support for telling a story, creating a place whose beauty lies in the overall quality it generates.
As regards the project, it can involve either a group of young creative people in computing who are settling the countryside or a mix of non-EC workers and students in an under- ground railway station in the suburbs of a metropolis.
In both cases the challenge is to manage to create a “lovely place”, a situation where the aesthetic quality lies in the search for harmony, which, in turn, comes from meeting ex- pectations, both predictable and extraordinary expectations, creating the heart and soul of the place.
Aldo Cibic
