Delight

Architectural Review, The, Feb, 2000 by Catherine Slessor

Floating serenely on the shimmering surface of Lake Lugano, this extraordinary cutaway interior model reconstructs Borromini's Baroque Roman masterpiece San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane. Designed by Mario Botta and painstakingly constructed by almost one hundred architects, draughtsmen, carpenters and craftsmen, the full-scale model acted as a centrepiece for an exhibition held last year at Lugano's Cantonal Art Museum to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Borromini's birth. A native of Bissone near Lugano, now part of Italian-speaking Switzerland, Borromini spent his apprentice years in Milan before moving to Rome and establishing his workshop. Built between 1634 and 1641 for an austere sect of Spanish monks, the compact church of San Carlo displays a novelty and intricacy that prefigured the development of the Baroque in Europe.

Mario Botta's remarkable reconstruction uses contemporary computer and construction technologies to render the Roman church's spectacular interior as a form of wood-built architecture. The dissected structure has a tectonic (and curiously sensuous) complexity that recalls elaborate matchstick models: 35 000 planks each 450mm thick are trussed together with steel wire in modular sections and mounted on a steel frame. Like Aldo Rossi's earlier floating Teatro del Mondo, which created an equally surreal spectacle around the Venetian lagoon, the frame sits on a buoyant platform moored on the shore of Lake Lugano.

Set against the lazy tourist ambience of boats, parks and promenade buildings, the model exhibits a heroic, monumental quality. 'The disconcerting cutaway of San Carlino standing out on the lake is intended as a challenge to our ways of using urban space', says Botta. 'It suggests a make-believe world of buildings that are real enough in their physical orders and structures, yet abstract and imaginary in their implications. Past centuries are evoked using languages and techniques that are recognizably of our own age, inviting onlookers to imagine - and experience - a world in which there is no distinction between history and reality.'