Architecture and the Word by Flora Ruchat-Roncati
Flora Ruchat-Roncati (1937-2012) was one of the leading lights of Swiss architecture in the second half of the 20th century. Part of the new generation of architects from Ticino with Aurelio Galfetti, Ivo Trümpy, Luigi Snozzi, Livio Vacchini and Mario Botta, Flora Ruchat-Roncati was the first full professor of planning at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich in 1985. Her works include the schools in Riva San Vitale, the Bagno di Bellinzona (both with Galfetti and Trümpy), and the A16 Transjurane motorway infrastructure designed with Renato Salvi between 1989 and 1998, and her collaboration with the Beratungsgruppe für Gestaltung for AlpTransit. To remember this critical figure ten years after her death, the book Memoria e trasformazione (Edizioni Casagrande, Bellinzona) collects a selection of her written work. We talked about it with editor Nicola Navone , vice-director of Archivio del Moderno and lecturer at the USI Academy of Architecture. What materials have been included in the collection? We selected seven of Flora Ruchat-Roncati's writings and five interviews based on two primary criteria: that they were published texts, thus approved by the author, and that among the papers donated by Ruchat-Roncati to the Archivio del Moderno, we had the original Italian version and, even better, the "genesis documents" of the texts (which we have taken into account in the apparatuses). The final choice was made considering their relevance in relation to the main themes of her architecture and the overall balance of the volume. How important were words in Flora Ruchat-Roncati's work?
