unique piece with signature: 'M. De Lucchi, 40, 2006, Betulla'

"Walls & Heroic Structures" is a collection of experimental architectural studies, created by Michele de Lucchi between 2005 and 2006.

of his series, De Lucchi writes:

"While sharpening pencils with a penknife, trimming the lead and whittling it down to the longest, smoothest and finest possible point without actually breaking it, I realized that I enjoy shaping wood, and carving its surface with the blade, just as much as I love drawing with a pencil on a sheet of paper.

So I moved from the lightness and quietness of the pencil to the roughness and din of the power saw, but without sacrificing my effort to treat the wood tenderly, as if it were paper, with effects that may be random but never mechanical.

These are solid little houses, found inside dead tree trunks knocked down by the wind. They were delicately worked with the power saw, and then trimmed in successive stages, modeling the surface with "brush-strokes" applied by the blade.

These little houses are solid because they are hollowed out; they are made from the shape of the wood and built without walls or floors, in a process that reveals a mindset of acceptance and improvement of what nature has to offer and of what specific contexts define.

The architect's mark is not abstracted from the peculiarity of the material, of the place and of the functionality requested by the work. These are not necessarily houses to be built; they were not made to add houses to houses. I am still wondering why I do these wood houses and why they look nice so small and twisted, whereas they would be so ugly built on a real scale, all straight and perfect, with their gutters and sealed windows, their shutters and balconies and switches to turn on the lights."

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