Revealing Encounters

A conversation with Rina Rolli and Tiziano Schürch (formerly Studio Ser)

Studio Ser is an architectural practice run between 2019 and 2025 by Swiss architects Rina Rolli (now Ofreia Architecture) and Tiziano Schürch (now Studio Tiziano Schürch). The conversation with Studio Ser took place in December 2022 at their office in Zurich, followed by a site visit to discover their project in Monte. This interview focused on three relevant aspects of their work in the context of the project they developed in the villages of Monte and Morbio Superiore, in the Ticino region of Switzerland. Firstly, it is interesting to see how their interpretation of the idea of reactivation and rehabilitation in a rural context, within the framework of the projects discussed, could lead to a model that could be transposed elsewhere. Another relevant aspect of their practice is the use of different scales to produce highly accurate drawings of the situation analysed and to construct small architectural interventions that blend subtly into the context. Finally, Studio Ser also organised a Summerschool in the Valle di Mubbio in July 2022 (and later a second one in Gandria in 2024), developing a participatory process involving local residents based on their preliminary analysis in the field, which also led to the construction of perrenial architectural prototypes that interact with the vernacular.

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Can you describe how you started the whole process in this valley of the south of Ticino?

Rina Rolli:

We were really interested from the beginning in the development of a pilot project that could possibly be implemented in a reality where a rehabilitation is needed. But in the case of Monte, it is almost more prevention, rather than rehabilitation. It is a reality that still works, but it is an extremely fragile one.  So, the intervention we did in Monte is more a prevention to keep this equilibrium. Whereas in the case of Morbio Superiore, another village which is located on the other side of the river, we can speak more of a rehabilitation process. Morbio Superiore is more peripheral, on the trajectory of the urban plane valley of Mendrisio, and thus it became a kind of dormitory village, while the inhabitants work in Chiasso, Mendrisio or Lugano. The sense of community got lost over time, and especially elderly people suffer from that, because they are the ones who spend their days there. In Morbio Superiore, our task has been the rehabilitation of a social fabric that completely lost the center. It was about giving back centrality to this place. There is this urban sprawl of monofamiliar houses going out of the very compact nucleo, because lots of people don’t see the interest of living in the nucleus.

Monte was our first project, and we can say that it is our pilot project. If you go to the roots of the project it could be applicable to realities that are also far away from Monte, but have similar backgrounds.

Monte · Studio Ser | Credits · Salomé Wackernagel, 2023

Tiziano Schürch:

When people ask how we proceed, we always explain that of course the social, historical and physical context, and the immense amount of time that we invested in observing it, mapping it, making interviews with people was at the end the reason for the intervention we proposed. We did not have a program, the program was given by the context.

So you started this project without a program?

Tiziano Schürch:

Exactly, without a program.

Rina Rolli:

Monte is now almost completed after three years on site.

At the beginning, we went to ring the bells of the houses!

Tiziano Schürch:

We went into the houses, and in fact we were the ones who would be observed. We really tried to make all the possible efforts to understand how the people lived here, instead of saying: “Ok, you tell us what you want, you try to do it” and so we could avoid any responsibility in the project design. Instead, we tried to understand how this community live and then out of it, to give it an interpretation.

Rina Rolli:

They would open up their personal albums of photographs, and usually, quite old people, so you could see the photographs of the public places of the village, how they were lived. People could tell us very personal anecdotes, but also very generic things, almost historical facts, and we also had a view in the archive. In this way we tried to get a full picture – it took us three months of interviewing before we even drew a line, before we did anything.

Was this time schedule planned from the beginning? Did you propose to your client (the municipality of Castel San Pietro) to do a participative project from the beginning, explaining that you would need first three months of analysing and getting familiar to the context?

Rina Rolli:

It evolved in time, it was not planned that it would be to this extent but we felt that it was needed, and the municipality was very comprehensive and wanted rather something well done. Fact is that we had no breef, usually as an architect you got a task, the client says “I want an hotel” and you do an hotel. In our case, the goal was to try to make the life of elderly people better in this village. So, what do you do? You need to find material, and to build your own task.

Tiziano Schürch:

Which is also something that we really liked here, that the project is not only what you designed, but also the fact that you arrived to understand a place and propose the location in which to interviene.

Physically small, but very powerful interventions…

Tiziano Schürch:

In general, every intervention tried to create a gathering situation between people, a social interaction: for example, elderly people need a handrail to walk around, but if they don’t have a reason to go out of their homes, why should they need a handrail? We had the idea of creating situations that would appeal not only one generation, not only one group of people, but a possible wide range – from kids to elderly people. So actually, all the interventions provide play situations for kids so that there is always this possible exchange. At the end, it is the idea of giving possibilities. As an architect, you don’t propose nor divide functions, but you kind of create objects that allow these possible uses. Out of the possible uses and interpretations, there is also the possibility of a more complex interaction between people. In the case of the handrails, you can put a marble inside, so the kid play with it…

And there was always the topic of the reactivation of the memory, assuring that the memory of the place can also be transmitted to the next generation, so when we knew that there was an anecdote related to the place where we were intervening, we would always try to make it somehow visible, or to use it for the design of the intervention. We added a fountain in front of the church, that is also the bench on which elderly people can sit, creating in the same time a play situation with water…

These are very subtle introductions, and superpositions of functions in the public space which form objects that allow various interpretations and therefore uses. This is something we tried to reproduce in every intervention. Also, the multiscalarity of these small interventions which are at the end very, very related to the big scale.

Reading the materiality of things, we really have the whole essence of a region, for example from the geology, if you’re working with a type of local stone to which you give back a visibility. We used Arzo marble, a stone quarried a handful of kilometers away from Monte. It is an extremely beautiful material that has been quarried since ancient times but found its greatest use in the Baroque era given its extremely rich and varied appearance. In many churches and sacred buildings, including the interiors of Milan Duomo, the material was used. Today, unfortunately, given its association with the religious world, the material is very little used. Within the project, we treated the material by trying to propose a different aesthetic, far from ecclesiastical associations.  Also in the use of traditional materials like for instance the brass, a material that have always been used here, and even the colour: from the small scale to the bigger one, the Valle di Muggio is a region which is also characterized by the colour of its houses, and how the doors are painted, how the stone reflects the light. At the end, it’s part of the landscape. From a work made out of details and small situations, their multiplication and the further reflexion around materiality and chromatic compositions convert it into a large scale project.

It's an object design work and a big scale (urban planning) project at the same time. Apart from the multiscalarity of your work, the temporality you bring is also quite interesting: because you start from a short time process (three months to get to know a place as well as to be able to develop a sensible approach of it is very short), but you speak also of this kind of immersion into the past of the people and history, a much more extended time frame. Furthermore, the force of your project is in your approach of participation: most of the times, the participative projects I have been involved in, or I saw from other collectives or studios are ephemeral. Whereas the use you propose is a perennial one…

Rina Rolli:

It is indeed, our purpose is to do interventions in the public space and in general in architecture that in a way that they create a background, on which life can happen. We always say that we hope that in twenty years, nobody is going to notice that any architect did anything in that space. Because it is going to be part of the collective memory, it’s going to be integrated. We hope that our work is coherent, but also sensible to the context – that it isn’t interfering, even if let’s say in ten years there are no elderly people anymore, because something happened (fingers crossed!), it shouldn’t become an obsolete thing, but stays something in the background which is constantly rediscovered. Because if you do something which is in the face of people all the time, it’s there, people can get quite angry with it, no?

Tiziano Schürch:

We also decided to create long-lasting objects, that can be uploaded with anecdotes and memories. Some parts of our interventions may be more fragile – the benches for example were made out of a stone and concrete structure, with a wooden plank on top of it. Probably one element will last more than the other, but we like the idea that they can last and that allow this kind of overlay of collective memories.

Can you tell more about the Summerschool “Revealing Encounters” that you organized in Summer 2022?

Tiziano Schürch:

Monte was the base camp let’s say, and each group of students has been working in a different village.

Rina Rolli:

The people that came were extremely motivated. Really eager, from all over the world – we offered it first in the schools we’re teaching at (the ETH in Zurich and the University of Barcelona-UPC), and also to the USI in Mendrisio – but then it exploded and we received applications from Harvard, Antwerp… everywhere. They had eight days, which is very short. First they went to their villages in groups and would walk around, observe, how people meet and try to speak with them if it was possible between the language barrier (for many it was possible because they were Spanish and it did a latin mixture).

Tiziano Schürch:

This is Monte and these were the other five villages – and here you already have Mendrisio. So it’s really one of those peripherical regions where you can reach the highway in 20 minutes.

A kind of remote periphery.

Tiziano Schürch:

Exactly. With the students, we started with an exercise we used three years ago in Chile, where we had the chance to be invited for a workshop. There we had the idea of working with a kind of cadavre exquis in which every student was drawing a part of the territory. In the case of the Valle di Muggio we divided the map in 16 sheets and everyone was then drawing a part of this huge map. For us, drawing as a very direct expression of one’s own perception of something, either if it’s a whole territory or a small scale object, is something very important. So drawings were there from the very beginning and we started with this large scale image of the valley. Then, students were brought everyday to their villages and would spend there 8 hours or more, making a survey of the public spaces. We had a very clear programme in which they first had to look for “encounters”.

An encounter is for us – the more and more we are working with this word, the more and more it becomes “ours” – first of all the encounter of people, in which architecture can create the encounter, but also of situations which are there, even if you don’t want it, in which your approach of physical reality is more or less similar to our lives, in which you maybe want to encounter someone, something, and sometimes you manage, sometimes not, sometimes it’s something else. At the end, you as an architect as well as a human being have to be able to make something out of it.The word “encounter” resume this idea. The students had to look first of all after existing encounters, situations that would facilitate and provoke encounter between people from the village…

Rina Rolli:

Three encounters that already work, and three encounters where they see potential of something.

Tiziano Schürch:

Kind of “missed” encounters. Where there is almost everything, but something is missing. For instance, there is an amazing fountain, but you cannot see it, and it’s just a situation where you walk by.

Rina Rolli:

We were facilitated by the fact that we were already doing a project in these two municipalities [Castel San Pietro and Valle di Muggio, where the summerschool took place in July 2022], because the night they (the students) decided what they were going to do, we called two technical officers of the two municipalities and explained to them: “Okay, this group wants to do that and that there, can we do this hole there, and do this and this there? Okay, the next group will…and so on”. It was quite an informal way of getting a permission of constructions!

Drawing in the framework of the Summerschool ‘Revealing Encounters’ | Credits: Aleix Salazar, Carmen Höhener, Lara Avram, 2022

And everything has been possible? They said okay to all the proposals made by the students? What is striking is the homogeneity, in colours, materiality…

Rina Rolli:

They approved all the proposals, yes. Regarding the materials, the students got a catalogue of local materials. And they got these two people – one from a construction company, and the other one who is a metal worker who were and their disposal. So, the students built together with their help during two days in the communal workshop and then proceeded to the installation onsite. It was quite a moment of celebration for students who never cut a stone or welded something, It was really a super interesting process.

Tiziano Schürch:

It’s amazing how the fact that you’re dealing with a very specific realization creates a lot of interactions with the populationWe had really nice situations where at the beginning, students proposed a subtle intervention with a bench placed close to an amazing fountain and some inhabitants were totally against, asking for the permission, saying that it was not allowed. But then, when it was finished, the same inhabitants went there, sit and said: “actually, it’s quite comfortable”. The day after we returned there with different crits we invited – Jan de Vylder, Ludovica Molo, and also some journalists…these inhabitants asked: “since you are here, could you also do something for this place there?” At the end, the reaction was really positive. Which is something also related to the ephemerality: even though the interventions are ephemeral, it is important to conceive and realize them in a way that give them a certain credibility. Ephemeral installations have in much cases a very different language than the public space – the given context itself. Even if we make something which is there for two months, we want to make something that can really be part of the public space.

Drawing in the framework of the Summerschool ‘Revealing Encounters’ | Credits: Albert Jimenez, Max Boeehringer, Sofia Manieri, 2022

So, despite the lasting character of the chosen materials (the stone, the brass, apart from the wood) and the precise realisation, the installation created and built during the summerschool were meant to be removed?

Rina Rolli:

This was the deal we had with the municipality.

Tiziano Schürch:

Actually, they are still there! It is about, at the end, creating new narratives, even though it is a small intervention. More and more, our job as architects is probably going to be to create narrative instead of buildings. Giving another limit to things so that other functions, other values can be found in something that is already there.

Speaking of narratives, one of these points of narration isn’t “il pozzo” (the shaft) creating a narrative pathway between various fountains, drifts and wash house ? This narrative was created apart from the Summerschool, by your own studio.

Rina Rolli:

The thematic of water is indeed very important. It’s an element that has the capacity, with no words nor big gesture, to draw people of all ages and conditions together. We rediscovered, through the talks we had with people so many hidden places that had historic traces, within these one water shaft that very few people knew. These are traces that are in front of you without almost anyone knowing it.

Tiziano Schürch:

Here again it’s about giving value to things that we, out of a very long observation, think are important for the memory and the identity of a place.

Rina Rolli:

In that sense,  it is also about sustainability – people will put more effort to maintain over time it if they can relay to the architectural object. Therefore, you create something that has already from the beginning a longer chance of living. This is for us a way of building sustainable. The social factor has a very big ecological impact. We are tearing down buildings from the 1970’s that could stay there at least another fifty years in their materiality, but it has other factors, which are social factors that apparently cannot cope with them anymore.

Tiziano Schürch:

The idea of the ordinary, of how to give presence to those things that are very important for a place in the daily life. For instance, we built at the entrance of the Bottega (the communal shop of Monte), a specially designed shelf for the baker that everyday makes the whole tour of the villages of the valley and leaves the bread there, instead of leaving it unprotected in front of the doors. This bread storage is a very small example of the type of daily gesture that is already there and becomes its materiality.

Rina Rolli:

The Bottega itself, which is a cooperative mostly run forward by volunteers, is a great example of community. We intervened inside of this shop in a very simple way: we just made an inventory of what was there, and then we reorganized the space. The Bottega can be considered as the communal shop, which is actually private because it is run by the cooperative, but on the base of our proposal the municipality invested in order to rearrange it.

In fact, the economic aspect and the repartition of the budget between all your interventions also plays a role in the concretization of your plans in the public space.

Tiziano Schürch:

Yes, and the definition of what is public space, what means public, why should the public money go there… The role of the architect is also someone who deals with the different actors, as a mediator.

Rina Rolli:

Apart from the Bottega you find in Monte, each village disposes of a house for the community, but they don’t really know what to do with them and they are mostly empty. In the case of Monte, so they have this big meeting space plus a kitchen, they also have an outside space, which is very rare in the nucleus of the village because it’s so dense. It was used only as an ornamental garden, therefore we just added a long table for the community, inhabitants can say: “I have ten friends over, where do I go? I’ll go there!”.

And you added also a pergola above the table…

Tiziano Schürch:

And this is also a way to make the life in the village, these rural situations more attractive: why should new inhabitants go live in single family house outside of the nucleus instead of here, if you start to have shared, public outside space with a bigger table than I could have at home, with a communal kitchen to cook for your visitors and family?

It's true that in this case, the village core as an alternative to periurban pavilion living interesting …

Tiziano Schürch:

Exactly, and again here, we come back to the idea of multiscalarity of the projet: for the table, we used a type of stone – the Arzo marble (which is actually not really a marble but is called like this), very much related with the place.

As another very small intervention, we worked on the public entrance of the cementery which is a narrow place, but a very important public space. Here is stays narrow, but we tried to give a public value to the situation, by making it more accessible with a few steps and flattening the soil as possible, and also by introducing a fountain, again like an encounter, something that has been created in a corner of this little space where no one imagined what it could become. We somehow proposed to give a function to this corner, creating a “rest” space there. With some details, we bring together all the stones that make the geology of the Mendrisiotto…

Rina Rolli:

This encounter occurs a bit in a “romanticized” way, but has also its justification: on the graves, you put plastic flowers if you don’t have any water point nearby. So we gave the possibility to get water for the cementery’s visitors [and there are regular in the Ticinese culture, especially elderly people], added to the ergonomic facilitation of the new access. 

And going to a last of our “encounters”: the people we talked with during our observation phase were always talking about the Piazza on and again. But we couldn’t find the place they were referring to, as it wasn’t the Piazza of the church we were thinking of. In one of the historical images we collected from Monte, during a beautiful moment with a woman of the village, we rediscovered it. The Piazza is on the main street, where the Bottega is, where the former post office was…this is the Piazza as it is remaining in the minds of the inhabitants. The woman told us that on this Piazza, before they asphalted it, there used to be four big pieces of stone with holes inside that had been calculated at the exact dimension of the canopy of the saint for the annual procession. During the rest of the year, children would play marbles – the marbles you find now in the handrails we created for the accessibility on the ramps you find at various places in the village. Even if the stone pieces that were composing the Piazza don’t have the same function anymore, we reintegrated them. We took advantage of the pavement renovation of the main street and integrated these traces of past memory.

Tiziano Schürch:

This Piazza is even more important because it was a cross connection for the two sides of the village.

Rina Rolli:

On the Piazza of the church: there used to be a bench behind, that we also discovered on the photographs that were given to us. It had been taken away for different reasons and therefore we decided this piazza will get a new bench, also on a corner of this place, with a similar materiality than before but newly integrated to the context.  

On this intervention, you’ve got this fine line carved into the floor, which leads the water as a part of the general path – getting back to the narrative of the water we spoke about before?

Monte · Studio Ser | Credits · Salomé Wackernagel, 2023

Tiziano Schürch:

Indeed, there is also a water connection here – the water goes out from a small brass tube placed under the bench and makes it way on this second Piazza corner! So the bench is not only a bench, it is also a fountain, which itself let the water flow following a small path we designed on the floor …

The multifunctionality is something we tried to reproduce in every intervention, from this example of the bench on the church’s Piazza up to the handrails that are also artefacts for marble play.

In the case of the handrail design, it happens to be very ordinary, just a bit thinner so it’s not too visible, and it has these brass terminations with holes where you can throw a marble. The kids are using it intensely.  

Also, the discreetness of the intervention and their contextuality is very important to our eyes, especially if you are working in such a delicate context as is an old village with this value.

Your work can be related to the intervention of Ocamica Tudanco, who realized the project of revalorization of the main square of the village of Mansilla Mayor, in Spain.

Tiziano Schürch:

Yes, we like this reference. It is a very simple volume placed on the central square, with this brass detail, and there is this nice picture with a lady bringing a plastic can to fill it – a everyday scene.

The fact that you are working in a very small scale, by repeating elements, colours and materials (like the use of brass) is to be understood as both a conceptual and also budget-improved decision? Imagine you would have a bigger budget to intervene in a similar context of an elderly going village…

Tiziano Schürch:

It was not a question of budget.

Rina Rolli:

We didn’t want it to become a “designed” space.

Your work is very poetic, which gives space for interpretation. Which leads me to my last question as it is if you work with references that helped you creating this poetic contextuality?

Rina Rolli:

It’s very interesting, because it’s not that we avoid references, but our main reference is the context. I mean, we draw so much information from the context.

Also, the work with specific materials comes from the context. If you know, in this context how to work with marble, ok then you’ll work with marble and choose an aesthetic that goes with the marble.

Tiziano Schürch:

Really, I was trying to imagine – maybe, in what we did on the floor, there is a little bit of Pikioni’s… But it’s maybe a kind of absorbed reference for everyone of us...   

Rina Rolli:

Like Scarpa.

Tiziano Schürch:

Our work mode has been more going to make a tour in the valley on a Saturday to see how the materials were used. Then understanding, and going to the stone maker. I really have the feeling that the design itself is not really an issue, even though our objects are very designed, but they were at the end the most normal, ordinary, direct and for us more spontaneous way out of this investigation to make, for instance a fountain. You use brass, because you cannot find any other material in the valley, for a fountain, that isn’t brass. Then the economic constraints give the form of the tap, and at the end its aesthetic.   

Rina Rolli:

In architecture, there is really an overload of references, we try not to work like that.

Tiziano Schürch:

Of course you may use punctual references, like for instance for the stone table, you may look at other references of similar stone tables. And for the colour, we looked at a publication of the Canton of Ticino which shows the most common colours in the region – in the Valle di Muggio, you have this green we used.

Rina Rolli:

By putting this colour to almost every element we created you exaggerate it in a way that this same green becomes visible as a new addition.

Tiziano Schürch:

We also put the students in the situation in which we said: “Okay, these are the two most common colours for the Muggio valley, if you want to paint metal or wood.” In the past, they would used either red or green so we gave them these two colours, in combination with the local stones and the brass. At the end, each place has its own language. It would have been interesting to do this project somewhere else.

It would be very interesting indeed, to take it, as you were saying at the beginning of our conversation, as a pilot project, a toolbox which you translate into another context.  

Rina Rolli:

We’re looking forward to do so! The project in Monte was concluded in October, and now the idea is to propose this project to other municipalities. It doesn’t mean it has to be necessarily in Ticino (of course this is now the ground we’re working on), it can be any Alpine region that deals with similar topics. 

For you, it should be in the mountains?

Rina Rolli:

It should be a peripheral region, it could also be a small village somewhere in Italy. The project would evolve.

Tiziano Schürch:

The in-between, places that are not peripheral anymore, that are not in an idyllic situation, also lacking of a clear identification, are interesting. It would be super interesting to work in those situations, on how to create a new centrality.