Ruinelli Associati SA Architetti SIA, Magazzino e Atelier per l’artista Miriam Cahn, 2015. Installation view at Palazzo Mora, 2016.

Ruinelli Architetti is based in Soglio, Bregaglia, an Italian speaking valley in the Swiss canton of Grisons. Our work has very deep bonds with this area, where time seems to pass more slowly and traces of the past are visible and alive. Our work concerns "Time Space Existence" as overlapping layers in the making of architecture in a continuum with the existing.
Time is to be understood primarily as an awareness of the cultural system in which our projects operate and their capacity to exist as an innovatory element within the tradition. It is also to be understood in terms of duration, the ability of architecture to tell the passage of time through the patina. That is why the choice of materials is important to us. They are used with the utmost sincerity, with craftsmanship and experimentation, untreated whenever possible, chosen not only for aesthetic reasons or the way they behave in the present but also with an eye to how they are going to change.
Space is to be understood as the layered, physical context on which we intervene in a process that tries to render it contemporary. Not wishing to interrupt the flow or to deny the contemporary, our architecture is sober and modest and does not want to leave too intrusive a mark, but to become itself a fact of normality for a specific place, a sign for which might be built afterwards.
We understand Existence both in an architectonic sense, as light which defines proportions and spatiality, and as the life which is to be lived inside and outside the building. The process involves the client and the client’s imagination and it has a social objective. Light completes the essential language which always aims at removing the superfluous until it is reduced to its "minimal terms". Our architectural objective, however, is not minimalism, but the construction for man of a space which can touch him emotionally, in which the essential serves to communicate the message more clearly.
Our contribution to the exhibition is just one work, Magazzino in Stampa, chosen as our poetic manifesto. The building, a compact monolith of 12x30m and 7m tall, is a container for raw materials and works of art as well as a working space for the artist. The objective is a building that brings together two ideas: that of a craftsman’s working space but one that has an architectural imprint. The ‘poor’ concrete weds the two aspirations, it is industrial, but the project of the formwork in rough planks gives a glimpse of imprecision that lends expressivity. The language is radical; white concrete, and huge iron door, and window frames, all on one level, create the impression that everything is embedded in the formwork. To complete this rigorous discourse there are "plastic" elements, the downspouts and the pedestrian ramp, which experiment with concrete’s potential to be moulded with expressivity, on the border between architecture and art.
The exhibit is the joint realisation of the work of Ruinelli Architetti with the artist and project’s client, Miriam Cahn and Ralph Feiner, the author of the photo reportage. The collaboration promotes the deeper investigation of the theme "Time Space Existence" observed from three continually intersecting points of view, narrating a quest for beauty through the poetry of concrete things.