11. Shelter
A natural boulder occupies a space. A constructed boulder contains one.
The difference may seem minimal. In reality it radically changes the meaning of the form.
Seen from outside, the stone appears as a compact presence. A solid body. A mass that resists the landscape around it. Its strength derives from the density of its matter and from the perception of its immobility.
Seen from outside, the stone appears as a compact presence. A solid body. A mass that resists the landscape around it. Its strength derives from the density of its matter and from the perception of its immobility.
The imagery of the mountain is deeply bound up with this condition.
Rocks delimit.
They protect.
They separate.
They define boundaries.
They form obstacles and landmarks.
Their existence coincides with their surface. There is no inside.
The constructed erratic, by contrast, introduces an unexpected possibility.
The mass is hollowed out.
And when the mass is hollowed out, the boulder changes function without changing form.
It is not an invention. In Val Bavona it has been done for centuries, without building anything: one takes the cavity the boulder already has beneath it, closes one side with a dry-stone wall, and obtains a stable, a store, a shelter. In the village of Foroglio an enormous erratic boulder, a relic of the last ice age, towers among the stone houses of the old core; as in many villages of the valley, the inhabitants have lived for centuries alongside these granite giants, sometimes incorporating them into their dwellings.
The boulder has not been modified. It has been inhabited.
Whoever did it did not design a space: they found it.
The constructed erratic performs the same gesture from the opposite side. It does not find a cavity: it establishes one.
It starts from the void and builds a stone around it.
A physical consequence follows, as well as a conceptual one.
An empty mass does not weigh. The Foroglio boulder does not move, and its authority in the village derives partly from this. A sheet-steel erratic of the same proportions can be loaded onto a lorry. The form declares one thing, the body says another: it promises weight and does not deliver it.
It is a deception, but of the opposite kind to that of the Albula bunkers.
There, the construction pretended to be rock in order to disappear.
Here it pretends to be mass in order to let itself be passed through.
Whoever enters a boulder faces a problem no boulder has ever had.
Looking out.
Translation: Archivio Umberto Cavenago
Val Bavona, Ticino. The boulder is the roof: the dry-stone walls close only the sides. The door and the window are those of any house.
Umberto Cavenago Souvenir di montagna, 2023
Cor-Ten steel and stone, 260 × 260 × 260 cm (steel element). Lugano-Molino Nuovo, permanent installation
The “cultivated boulders” of Val Bavona are farming landscapes built on top of the rock: an extreme form of cohabitation between nature and human labour, in which the stone is not removed but becomes the very structure of the field.
The same house seen from a distance: from the meadow, boulder and dwelling read as a single volume. The architecture does not correct the terrain, it uses it.
A massive granite block deposited by the glacier during the last ice age dominates the wooded landscape of the valley. At its base, a small space has been made by exploiting the natural cavity of the rock: the front wall, closed with dry local stone and fitted with a wooden door, turns the geological shelter into a habitable space.
House built on top of an erratic boulder in Val d’Ultimo (Italy). The boulder serves as the foundation: the timber structure rests directly on the rock, which has not been levelled.