STAIR IN ERBUSCO
Space, structure and movement are the essence of a staircase. The transition between levels, instead of generating irrelevant places, can become a real project moment. Starting from these exquisitely architectural considerations and the meticulous work that we present, the "two-level" scale is told.
In a specifically rigorous and silent space Bruno Vaerini invents a dancing scale. The constant research in creating a humanized architecture pushes him to invent architectural bodies with a soul, never motionless scales, but always sensually animated. Elements made with simple materials but worked with great sensitivity and skill by artisans totally involved by the author. The complicity between artist and craftsman is central to the work of this architect: the exchange becomes a profitable nourishment of the project. The idea, starting point, changes, takes other forms and is enriched with technical aspects and details, dictated by constructive needs or by rethinking during construction. Here there are no fixed points, if not the initial idea. Here there is not only the architect's voice in a sterile vision of the world, there are no predefined methods, refined formalisms. With Vaerini everything lends itself to being reinvented. The idea of the project to humanize needs contamination, it needs to be fertilized by the ideas of the artisans who observe it from another point of view, it needs contact with the outside world.
The staircase tells the gesture of going up a level, moving from one floor to another, a vertical transition between the day and the night. Steps in the planking participate in the structural effort, the cadence of the steps brings the staircase into sound redundancy. The details derive from the very nature of the chosen material, from time to time involved in revealing its sincere static nature and its deep poetic vocation.
Vaerini chooses the olive wood for its hardness, for its arabesque vein and for its intense fragrance, but asks him in particular to be a structural element. Thin strips of wood veneers are overlapped and glued to form sturdy staves, then curved and shaped through the use of a negative template of the same scale, created in "ad hoc" carpentry for this job. In a metaphysical atmosphere, between sacred architecture and theatrical architecture, skilled hands realize this extraordinary sculpture with months of work. Like wooden bandages that envelop the gesture of climbing, starting from the ground on tiptoe and rising upwards, they end up as "untangled" by the centrifugal dynamism of the circular shape. But the invention does not end here: the scale tested in place does not withstand the weight of people passing, twists and tilts, sways dangerously. Vaerini helps him by inventing small steel inserts to stiffen the structure: supports, shims, tie rods, struts, in a sort of brief catalog of structural keys. The scale, element after element reaches the degree of stability sought, finding the exact point of transition between hypostaticity and staticity.
