A nursery school for 120 children from Guastalla, orphans of two schools irreparably damaged by the earthquake that struck Emilia two years ago; a school that will finally give education and a future to 2 children in Gaza; and also a project for young architects financed with the senator's allowance received by Renzo Piano (around 5 euros a month). It is the social architecture of Mario Cucinella, a 54-year-old Bolognese architect of Sicilian origins and student of the senator for life and the most famous Italian representative of the sector in the world.
“It costs as much as an 'ugly' building, but it will be beautiful”, says Cucinella proudly, describing the eco-sustainable space that will be more than a school for the children of the Emilia municipality, costing just 1.650 per square metre. An absolutely standard cost, for an operation whose project is presented on 12th April. Beautiful, as the author maintains, not only for the materials used (it's all in wood), but because it puts into practice a new concept of "quality of space, which allows children to re-appropriate the surrounding spaces and not to be closed between four walls with a window”.
In fact, seeing it in the renderings, the new nursery school in Guastalla is a space that is anything but conventional: through the large windows divided by wooden structures, it puts the children in very close contact with nature. The very nature that he took away two years ago now gives hope back to an entire community, setting itself up as a model for the architecture of the future, which cannot do without the environment and its respect. That's why the 54-year-old student of Renzo Piano is also keen to point out that "all the materials used are eco-sustainable", as if this aspect represented not only a precise professional responsibility of the architect but also a message to be handed down to the new generations.
Generations that need a future, let alone in the Palestinian territories of Gaza, where there are still those who don't even have water. Cucinella's responsible architecture has arrived there too: the UN agency for the relief and employment of Palestinian refugees (UNHRWA), through a 2,3 million dollar order financed by the Islamic Development Bank (IDB), has entrusted him with the construction of one of the dozens schools that will finally be able to give a future to the children of Gaza, in the Palestinian territories. "In the last three years, 40 have been built, but another hundred are needed: around 40 children still remain outside the education system".
And then there is the project, not very demagogic but very concrete, of the G-124 (from the name of the office occupied by Piano in Palazzo Madama): "I and two other colleagues, the engineer Maurizio Milan and the architect Massimo Alvisi, host two young architects each in our studios for a year to form them and to carry out projects for three large Italian cities (one in the North, one in the Centre, one in the South, ed), starting from central themes such as traffic, energy, spaces. We will have the first results by the end of the summer”.
