MCA project – Mario Cucinella
Realization: WASP
Director of photography: Iago Corazza
I met Mario Cucinella a few years ago at SAIE in Bologna, the famous International Construction and Building Fair. Since then we have become friends and, when the incredible innovative architectures he designs and builds around the world let him return to his studio in Bologna and when I manage to take a break from my anthropological reports, the architect and I manage to meet, simply to spend a Christmas evening together or to study how to collaborate on an exciting project. In the classrooms of the S.O.S. (School of Sustainability), a great training opportunity realized by Mario in Bologna, was that for example we have used hundreds of my images to show other architects with a green gaze, that by carefully observing the past you can learn to build a future worthy of this name. One day Mario, carefully leafing through some pages of my book that showed the wonders of the Ellora caves in India, told me about TECLA, an extraordinary idea capable of giving a new shape to the future of living. Born from one of his projects and from the collaboration with Massimo Moretti, founder of Wasp, TECLA is the concrete response to the climate emergency, the need to build sustainable homes at 0 Km and the growing global issue of housing emergency. This construction technique manages to use the latest technologies to transform the material, indeed the only one worthy of the name: the earth. In fact, Mario managed to create TECLA, his project of an eco-sustainable house entirely printed in 3D that uses the same raw earth of the place where it was built and on which it rests as the material for its construction. TECLA therefore represents an innovative circular model of housing, completely Italian, which brings together the most advanced research on construction practices, an in-depth study of bioclimatic principles and the use of natural and local materials. It is a project with close to zero emissions which, thanks to the use of raw earth, constitutes a pioneering example of a house with reduced waste and scraps and very low carbon emissions. He therefore asks me to be the photographer who will create the images of this idea, and to make this concept concrete for those who will not be able to slide their fingers on the surface of TECLA, thus helping them recognize the material that for each population, in a precise moment in history has been called home: the earth. Mario points to the pages of my books open on simple adobe constructions, touches them with his fingers and then goes off to follow some of his projects so futuristic and so perfect that they remind me of the tribes and forests where I spend many of my days as a photojournalist. Thanks to the strong connection between past and future represented by Tecla, man is then repositioned at the center of the earth starting from the earth itself. TECLA is above all this, and it is also for this reason that I am particularly proud of these images, also used by me to create the opening film of the London Design Biennale 2021. Thanks Mario.
