Michele De Lucchi is one of the most famous and successful designers of the last decades. In recent years he and his studio, AMDL CIRCLE, have launched the Earth Stations, fundamental research projects addressing coexistence on our planet where people can “experience unprogrammed moments of learning, joy, interaction and reflection”. What is the next step? And what will the architecture of the future look like? An interview.
As an architect and designer, Michele De Lucchi has created iconic buildings and objects. His office in Milan, A M D L C I R C L E, is an internationally renowned multidisciplinary studio focusing on the big picture: “We are a Circle. We create spaces, objects and images charged with emotion, sharing the desire to improve the quality of the environment in which we live. Our Circle is open to human interactions, to the exchange of ideas and expertise.” A striking example is the research project Earth Stations, a well-structured process of formal experimentation, behavioural analysis and functional hybridisation, expressed in a series of collective and individual buildings that could easily influence the way we learn, create and think.
Mindfulness is a big topic today—even in architecture and design. Is mindfulness overrated?
M
DL
Yes. I mean, very often it’s just very fashionable to say we are mindful. But apart from that, all activities that we can perform in terms of meditation and self-consciousness can be very helpful.
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Would you even say mindfulness is essential for creative people?
M
DL
Well, you know, I’ve been practising meditation for several years. At the beginning I was very hesitant, because somebody had told me that meditation can actually inhibit creativity instead of helping us to become open-minded and looking for alternatives and new solutions. Until I met David Lynch.
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David Lynch, the film director and painter?
M
DL
Yes! David Lynch is very much into meditation. He taught me transcendental meditation. That’s is a way of meditation that is very helpful for taking away negative stress and helping you focus on the positive side. Transcendental meditation is not mindfulness. It’s not yoga. It is much more. If you want, it is also much simpler to practise. You only have to find a way to put your mind at ease.
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That’s very interesting. Would you say meditation has changed your work, or at least influenced it in some way?
M
DL
I would say yes. I’m still practising meditation with a lot of travelling, an endless journey and all the worries about my projects. So meditation is very helpful for focusing on what is important. It helps to separate what’s important from all the stupid stuff that isn’t. If you take out all the stress, the mind automatically winds down slowly and you feel another perspective on reality.
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This brings one of your major projects to mind—Earth Stations, which generate mindfulness towards people and nature.
M
DL
You know, meditation is a kind of practice of being aware of what you do. And this is very important today, where we have such a dramatic programme on the table. The climate change is a big problem, which we don’t know how to face. And we have all the social problems as well. Today, they are actually much more dangerous than climate change, even though it is the biggest problem in itself. In Italy, for example, we are obsessed with immigration. People are starting to go crazy about this, thinking their world will change. They say that Italy will no longer belong to Italians, but to foreigners.
This is a social problem, because, you know, we will face more and more immigration.
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Your answer to this problem is …
M
DL
… that we don’t have a solution. The only solution is to accept immigration, because parts of the world will no longer be liveable. People need to move to other places. The climate crisis is a huge problem, and then there’s the unequal distribution of wealth. This is a wrong and dangerous situation.
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Seems like you’re coming back to where you started as a young architect, when you stood up against the status quo. Are you becoming a revolutionary again?
M
DL
I honestly think it is the moment to become a revolutionary. Our profession as architects, as designers, is very much a speculative one.
I think that when we design something, when we create a vision, we try to visualise a possible future, and the possible future is a possible future only if we face these problems. Because we not only design the colour of the space. We don’t simply choose materials—concrete or metal or wood or terracotta. We are creating a new imagination for the future. And our role as architects is to create a future that is sustainable. A sustainability that just aims at today’s stability would be fake.
So what is future sustainability all about?
M
DL
We have to completely rethink the concept of sustainability. The one that we are perceiving today is wrong. We are continuously seeking to adapt the world to our needs—our unconscious needs, that is. Neurologists and psychoanalysts say that our conscious mind only accounts for 20 per cent of what we do. All the rest is just unconscious, driven by conventionality. We have to refine that 80 per cent. We still think that in order to survive, we have to kill lions and bears and that we have to fight against the wilderness of the world. But it’s not like that. We have to survive the wilderness of the human being.
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So our mental evolution is still lagging behind our technological advances?
M
DL
Yes. Today we have AI, which is fantastic. I believe in AI. I know it could be scary, and I know that it can be used for very negative and dangerous activities. But I know as well that AI is the basic knowledge of humanity. ChatGPT, for instance, is very funny. I enjoy the tool and I use it at the university, telling the students that ChatGPT is the benchmark we have to jump over if we want to truly achieve something.
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What is fascinating about artificial intelligence is the fact that it is only recombining what mankind has already achieved. It’s not creating something genuinely new on its own, although some results seem pretty stunning. It keeps on recombining parts from the past. And this doesn’t sound like a solution.
M
DL
This is the point. We have to refound everything. We should not repeat the mistakes of the past, because everything that we did in the past has brought us to the situation we face today. So this is not the solution. This is not the way; we have to find another way.
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I stumbled across a wonderful quote of yours, where you said, Architecture that doesn’t consider its effect on people is lame architecture. So it’s all about people, isn’t it?
M
DL
Yes. And that is especially concerning the fact that many of the activities that we do in our work as architects are very technical, because we have to get the authorisation of the public and the public administrations. We have to find a way that is convenient. The cheapest one. The quickest one. The most acceptable one. The best one. The best-selling one. All this stuff never takes into consideration the real needs that we have today. We have to come back to the idea of architecture as a humanistic profession, something that gives a positive vision of the future. We have to rebuild the idea of future.
Modernism also had a positive idea of the future. But as you mentioned before, it was often just using tech tools to exploit an entire planet.
M
DL
Yes. But today’s society has changed very much. The same goes for buildings and traditional typologies. Offices, for example, are changing rapidly, especially after COVID. Corona has completely altered our old habit of going to the office and being part of it. Lots of companies now work four days a week instead of five. And this looks very positive, because those companies are realising that it can be more efficient. Offices are now places of encounter, and connecting people becomes a strength.
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The question is: Will people give up cocooning after COVID and seek to be confronted with different ideas again?
M
DL
The key to everything is multifunctionality. Offices are not just spaces where you do something specific and nothing else besides, but are places for a lot of different activities: meeting, eating, relaxing, exhibiting, displaying. Even museums are no longer spaces for paintings or for sculptures on pedestals; the museum is now a space for cultural entertainment, where people go to feed their curiosity through emotions.
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Could you expand on your idea of a truly humanistic architecture? What does this mean for future buildings and planning?
M
DL
Human relationships are always at the heart of our philosophy. We can only solve the world’s problems if we are able to live together. And this is so complicated, thinking of Ukraine, North Korea or even South America. I mean, our society is not ready to face the big challenges that are in front of us. So architecture should be able to participate in this situation and to produce clear, simple and very lovable visions of the future.
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Thank you very much for your time.