STEFANO RIVA

 

Lumiar, Lisboa,

23.10.15, 16.30h

 

Stefano

is Italian and lives in Lisbon for 20 years, where he works as Architect.

When he is free, one of his big pleasures is to go to his vegetable garden, a beautiful piece of land he cultivates with some friends just outside of the city center.
The garden is for him the antithesis of the House.
The house is protection, comfort, while the garden brings him to a physical connection with the ground and with a wider horizon...
Stefano mentions the architect Carlo Scarpa(1906-1978):

“Between a tree and a house, chose the tree”
(“Tra un albero e una casa, scegliete l'albero“).
 

Is in the garden that we meet to speak about him, his work/architecture, his impressions about the city's development, but also about his own house, and the relationship between private/public space.

Stefano is satisfied with the urban development of the city of Lisbon: the works that re-approached the city to the river, and those that, from a social redemption, into physical one, reinvented the area of Intendente, recovering the square and the old buildings now animated by bars and cultural projects.

We talk about Lisbon and the deep touristic transformation it is going through.

The higher prices, and the noise of the TUC TUC in historic districts are the mirror of a deformation process: the city center is more photographed, but also less habitable and inhabited by locals.
Stefano defines himself basically as an urban person;
it’s in this city that he loves to live.
In Lisbon, things happens spontaneously, the streets are like a collective living room beside the fact that it is still possible to walk around nicely.

About his House/Casa, a space that he is slowly loving more and more, he defines it like a dress, his dress, mentioning how hard is for him to see people living and sleeping in the streets, asking for money, and how he can not associate this vision with any idea of freedom.

More then to objects Stefano get attached to the Space(a view, a window) and he hopes one day (as the architect Isao Hosoe) to be able to fit all his belongings just into a suitcase.

 

When I ask Stefano about Freedom he answers that he feels "Free" when and if he can make choices:
when he can organize his work and his time without the need to create a forced separation between free and occupied time...

...to listen is to imagine...

 

Thank you Stefano for this pleasant afternoon, between interesting words and vegetables!

 

Good listening!

 

 

 

 

 

SPACE:

 

This interview took place open air, sitting on a small table in front of the Museo do Traje, in Lumiar, a district in Lisbon suburb.

It was slightly breezy when we started and in a certain moment I had to protect the microphone of my Zoom Recorder to preserve the audio quality. This created a slight difference in the audio between the very first part of the interview and the second.

The location is just beside a highway, but the small square, used now as a parking place, was almost empty, and quite silent, permitting us a quiet conversation.