& Andrea Sassi
Eugenio Thiella and A. Sassi are Italian architects based in Zürich, sharing a practice driven by relentless curiosity and physical experimentation. Sassi uses architecture as a method to investigate how forms emerge and transform, viewing his final objects simply as traces of a deeper exploration into the hidden rules of natural and artificial systems. Thiella applies this playful ethos to the realm of furniture; deeply allergic to serial repetition, he creates ‘occupation and rescue devices’—anti-furniture prototypes designed to actively defy conventional function, with device no13 currently in development.
They are extracted, melted, pressed, cut, assembled and distributed according to a logic of efficiency and profit. Their value is measured through speed, precision, repeatability and immediate availability. Plastic, metal and synthetic composites often enter the world as finished, inert things: resistant, stable, almost indifferent to time. They are designed to last, but also to be
replaced.
This work speculates on an hypothetical opposite process. Slow, dirty, symbiotic, unefficient, unfinished, decomposing, replicating, fragile method. Here, the object is not simply manufactured. It is cultivated. Its form is not imposed in a single gesture, but emerges through a sequence of biological passages: spores, substrate, sterilisation, inoculation, growth, colonisation, fructification.
The material is not passive. It reacts, expands, consumes, transforms. It must be cared for before it can be used. To make an object through mycelium means to accept another temporality.
The process cannot be completely forced. It depends on humidity, temperature, contamination, oxygen, darkness, waiting. Production becomes less a question of control than of negotiation. The maker does not dominate the material; they prepare the conditions in which the material can become itself.
In this sense, the final object carries within it a paradox. It may resemble furniture, a panel, a container, or a designed artefact, but before becoming a thing, it was a living process. Its final form is the visible trace of an invisible metabolism. What appears solid was once growth. What appears finished was once unstable and dependent. Against the consumerist promise of instant objects and permanent materials, mycelium introduces the possibility of a different relationship with reciprocal temporary matter. It asks us to reconsider what it means to possess and to preserve.
© Portrait by Daniele Mango