Mazzocchioo is an architectural internet journal that values the written thought and the authenticity of ideas. In a contemporary world where knowledge is defined by means of quantity and diffusion, M acts as a reminder of ‘those strange objects with which the humanist intellectuals amused themselves [in Renaissance]: the mazzocchi’

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”An architecture imagined by Borges and drawn by Escher, a reminder of those strange objects with which the humanist intellectuals amused themselves: the mazzocchi. [..] They were preferably based on a geometrization of surfaces generated by the rotation of a circumference around a coplanar, external axis. By superimposing a number of mazzocchi of different diameters, Pierro della Francesca designs the complex geometry for a large vase that represents the triumph of reason over matter, that sublime coincidence between poetry and abstraction obtained thanks to rigorous logical concatenation, which is also present in the best projects of Vacchini. The mazzocchi, these ‘useless’ objects, a mere demonstration of mechanical and perspective skills, represent the dominion of the artificial over nature, but also reveal that abstraction, like beauty, is originally without purpose, and that even mechanics contains a frivolous , irrational soul, a ‘bachelor machine’.”

 

Roberto Masiero talking about the Post Office in Locarno by Vacchini, Livio Vacchini, Works and Projects, ed.GG, p.24