Interview: Claudio Silvestrin
A complex and shy personality, Silvestrin keeps a distance from the architecture scene, despite having plenty of high-profile clients. Vicky Richardson met the Italian architect in his London studio as he prepares to publish the first volume of his work in a decade...
[caption id="attachment_1951" align="alignnone" width="425" caption="Claudio Silvestrin, photo by Elke Meitzel"]
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‘I’m a lone wolf’, Claudio Silvestrin says of himself. By that he means that he does not hang out on the architecture scene. He is not a networker, a golf player or a talker at public or academic events. All that he describes as the ‘blah, blah, blah’ of architecture. Silvestrin’s architecture is often described as austere, and the term could well be applied to the man himself.
Yet he is revered by clients such as gallerist Victoria Miro, designer Giorgio Armani and rap star Kanye West, all of whom have worked with him over a period of some years and who respond to what they see as a spiritual, elemental quality of his buildings.
Discussing architecture with Silvestrin is not straightforward. He prefers to let his work speak for itself, partly because he is not keen on the way architects constantly promote themselves, but mostly because the intended effect of his work is emotional rather than theoretical or social. It means that he has been somewhat shunned by the academic crowd, though is embraced by those in fashion, art and music.
[caption id="attachment_1943" align="alignnone" width="425" caption="Victoria Miro's Islington Gallery, photo by Marina Bolla"]
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Employees, colleagues and clients speak in high terms of Silvestrin, as an architect and an individual. Former business partner John Pawson, from whom Silvestrin split in 1989, is full of heart-warming praise, even though the pair have not spoken for years. ‘Architecturally we are very much of the same mind. Things in those days were tough for me privately and being young, I let it get in the way of work. Claudio had no choice but to leave. It was like having two divorces in one year, but the memories of working with him are very warm. He’s a great character,’ says Pawson.
After a period of relative silence where few of his many interior projects, buildings and furniture designs have been published, Silvestrin is preparing a book about his work that will be published later this year with a text by Franco Bertoni. It marks 10 years since the last publication which is also by Bertoni, a historian and academic whose main interests are neo-classicism and ceramics. It’s telling – and refreshing – that Silvestrin prefers the insight of a historian on his work.
Unlike Pawson, who commodified Minimalism by writing books of the same name, Silvestrin has resisted the temptation to categorise his work. His rejection of the intellectual side of the profession belies a real knowledge and passion for historic buildings. ‘I can’t remember any contemporary building that made me faint for joy. As a student I traveled all over the place to see work by Stirling and all the masters,’ says Silvestrin. ‘Today I only like old buildings – particularly churches and monasteries, which have a sense of light, space, strength and proportion’.
Silvestrin studied at the AA in the early 1980s at a time he describes as very much about thinking and questioning. He was taught by Don Bates of Australian Lab Architecture Studio, who went on to work for Daniel Libeskind, and another Australian, John Andrews, whose big influences were Louis Khan and José Luis Sert. ‘I was lucky to build up a strong theoretical foundation,’ says Silvestin, although he later rejected thinking and talking in favour of ‘making buildings’. Pawson remembers him reading Sir Thomas Aquinas: ‘He actually did read it and study it – there’s no hypocrisy with Claudio’.
One senses that Silvestrin feels he has more in common with a fellow Italian, Andrea Palladio, even if they are separated by more than 500 years of history. Recently he married his second wife in the Villa Godi. ‘What counts in Pallladio’s work is the importance of space as void. At La Rotunda four staircases in the corners are tiny in order to preserve this effect’. Silvestrin is not quite so egotistical as to directly compare himself to Palladio, yet he says with feeling, ‘it was tough for Palladio. I’ve read all his letters – he died in poverty and was discovered many years later as a great master’. He also takes on some key principles for his own work. ‘Palladio was trying to give value to the Greek and Roman elements of architecture that had been neglected. In a way it’s what I’m trying to do in my work,’ says Silvestrin.
Despite his connections, Silvestrin’s London studio is located in a particularly scruffy part of Hackney, off Kingsland Road, a location he chose because it provides calm views of Regents Canal, a stretch of water that appeals to his love of the elements. The former warehouse provides a neutral space that he has converted with a series of low, white partition walls. The old lift shaft has been turned into a small room for meditation where, seated on a Mies van der Rohe Barcelona Stool in white leather, Silvestrin looks out along the clear line of water which he says helps to focus his mind.
[caption id="attachment_1944" align="alignnone" width="425" caption="CSA London Office, photo by Marina Bolla"]
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The area is quite a mixture and despite his clear desire for the uncluttered space, Silvestrin loves the chaotic nature of east London. Although London has been his base since studying at the AA, these days he is international and thinks of the world ‘as a whole’, traveling constantly and working in Singapore, Mexico, the Caribean and Brazil, emailing sketches back to the office on his Blackberry.
He was born and grew up in Milan, where his family were artisan builders, but it was not until 2006 that he set up a studio there. The Milan office, located in the Brera, employs as many architects as London, and is apparently fairing better in the current financial crisis. But Silvestrin’s heart and young family are in London. He even speaks with a strange mixture of Italian and the flat vowels of a London accent. ‘In Milan there’s nowhere funky,‘ he says. ‘It’s trying hard but maybe the difference is the people. Here it’s more spontaneous’.
Silvestrin rarely chases a job: clients come, he says, because they like what he does. ‘Ten out of 10 times, they call me up out of the blue’. That’s how it happened with musician Kanye West, for whom Silvestrin designed a Manhattan loft and a house in LA which was eventually shelved after it was refused planning permission. West is Silvestrin’s favourite type of client: ‘someone who wants to learn, who is ambitious but at the same time aware that they don’t know everything’. Having West as a client is ‘like having a student’ he says. ‘He wants to learn to draw’.
[caption id="attachment_1945" align="alignnone" width="425" caption="Kanye West's loft, photo by Marina Bolla"]
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Silvestrin seems genuinely touched by West’s enthusiasm for his work, suggesting that I compare the artists’ videos from five years ago with his latest and notice how influenced the latter is by minimalism.’ He gets equally vocal about his worst type of client, the type who thinks they know everything and wants to make the final decision.
Here it becomes obvious that, for some, Silvestrin is not an easy architect to work with. For his latest project, the London outpost of Milanese bakery Princi (which Silvestrin designed in 2006), the architect says, ‘I made so many compromises, I was at the point of being suicidal’. The main point of difference with the owner, Alan Yau, who has a 50 per cent stake in the London branch, was a water feature. ‘Yau spent a lot of energy trying to get rid of it. Rocco Princi understood that it was not just a decorative feature, but had meaning. Yau is totally insensitive. He’s like an accountant, a money man,’ rages Silvestrin.
Victoria Miro, for whom Silvestrin designed a gallery in Islington in 2006 and much earlier (in 1988) a house in Hampstead, implies that she understands what it means to work with someone who refuses to compromise. ‘Claudio is very much the artist, but he’s mellowed and matured and is a little bit easier to work with these days’.
Silvestrin is an artist in the more important sense that ‘his understanding of space is exceptional’, says Miro. Armani too, for whom the architect has worked with on 26 projects, heaps praise on Silvestrin saying that his work has a ‘complexity behind a simplicity that is so unspectacular, so understated, as to render it spectacular’.
These days we’ve become used to architecture being just another branch of the construction industry. Silvestrin, on the other hand, thinks that architecture is a calling, not unlike the preisthood. Today’s profession demands that architects be good communicators, team players and that they must have a social, or at least environmental, agenda. Their capacity for compromise and consultation is celebrated.
Such ideas are anathema to Silvestrin and it is no wonder that he prefers to bury himself in his work. ‘To keep your integrity these days you have to work at it seven days out of seven,’ he says. ‘Mediocrity is everywhere and so everyone has to aim higher’
