We expect architecture to be like a canzona – sentimental mathematics.

Venturi used to say that he liked “Scarlatti and the Beatles”; I’d give Techno to Richard Rogers (…) Michael Nyman to Souto de Moura, Smashing Pumpkins to Rem Koolhaas (…). I myself like sophisticated rock, soft and somewhat lamentable such as that of the early records of Elvis Costello. How about you?

Cino Zucchi, Patognomica dell’architettura moderna

When I arrived in Milan in the early eighties, Cino Zucchi was as popular among young and student architects as a rising rock star. It was the time when Zucchi was completing his first projects, yet also a time of the saturation of Italian architecture encumbered by the historical approach that was no longer a method, but was turning into an airtight academicism.

With Zucchi’s work, canopies and parking lots, industrial and commercial buildings finally received due acknowledgment as architecture, long denied to them by the “old school”. The old school simply neglected those buildings, being outside their frame of reference and alien to their somewhat idealistic attempts to define the boundaries of a city.