Performed activities

Assistance at the Building Site

"Renzo climbed up the slopes to the top and once there he saw the Cathedral, a Big Machine alone onto the plain, like something rising more from a desert than inside a town; so he stopped at once, forgiving all his troubles, to gaze from afar at that Eighth Wonder of which he knew since his childhood."

That way Alessandro Manzoni describes Renzo staring at the never ending building site of the Cathedral in Milano. Still today and certainly in the future this Cathedral will appear like a big machine, something that needs a constant and careful maintenance to be kept well.



Instead, all the modern building sites do have a definite time; the signs onto the streets, in addition to the names of the designer, the structure engineer and all involved in the project, also show the deadline of the works, which won’t be probably kept. The building site is a transient structure, an orderly chaos, framed by the months, the years; once the works are over all around will disappear, the sounds, the screams, the sheds…everything vanishes together with the problems that the big machine brought. To document a particular cage made of steel bars tied by iron wires, before seeing it disappear into the caisson and then into the “sarcophagus” of concrete, and knowing the carpenter’s as well as the engineer’s work will be drowned forever into it, is in a way something very fascinating.