Argentina part one: Leo

1.

Leonora’s the name they gave me, but it’s Leo, thanks, an in-between brevity fitting for one like me in a place like this at a time the newspapers celebrate as a new beginning. It’s not the worst moment to be half European and half Mapuche.

Some mise en scène: my family here splits its time between the agrarian pursuits of my uncle Paolo, based in San Rafael, and the businesses managed by his cousin Luca in Buenos Aires and Montevideo. Luca’s wife Laura owns property in Montevideo, home also to Luca’s sisters Cosima and Marta. Luca brought Cosima’s Milan trilogy, edited by Natalia, my grandmother, to Latin American readers. I met her in San Rafael before the war, and in Piranesi afterward. Maria and Guillermo, my Mapuche grandmother and father, are Paolo’s partners in San Rafael. making wine and breeding horses.

Much closer to the Andes than Buenos Aires, San Rafael lies within Mapuche territory. After a treaty ended the strife that killed my grandfather, Maria ran the farmstead Paolo bought. My mother Franny learned Mapudungun from her, then fell in love with her son. This was anticipated on both sides of my family, although their divination methods differ. The Etruscans make charts, while the Piranesi intuit the infant’s nature at birth. Mapuche adepts like Maria go into a trance to read a child’s character. All agree it’s not exactly predictive. What this means in practice is a bit unclear.

2.

To call a place in time a midcentury is to divide a longer expanse in two, leaving me among others to look back and ahead, extrapolating from my own and reported experience what it meant and might mean, this lived and unlived thing whose midpoint is here and now. I find this odd, arbitrary, yet fitting given that I’m unclear exactly where I’m headed.

Luca, friends with an exiled Polish writer, quoted him to me on how we find our way only by trial and error, weighing things and acquiring tastes. Luca is reliably forthcoming on certain topics, good at citing from life the foibles we bring to our encounters, and Exhibit A, as my grandmother Natalia might put it, of the charm that foibles give people, despite their efforts at propriety. I take courage from him when, ambiguously dressed, I swagger into a bar said to harbor women of a rougher sort to understand how they disport, what they discuss, how they size up the trade. In such a sizing up, I honor my Etruscan lineage, Luca tells me.

I’m a bit exotic, mixing two very different ideas of beauty. My namesake Nora has a bit of this — a full Etruscan with a temper, “docile as a volcano” (or a crocodile). Hunting gave me the patience to stalk and an endurance honed by Andes passes I’ve crossed with my father and my cousins.

When my parents wed, Paolo invited Matteo over to bless their marriage. His presence awed the local gentry — a real grandee as opposed to their provincial facsimiles. They were viewed thereafter as landowners with a touch of aristocracy, natural and otherwise, that led our European neighbors to grant them a certain latitude. I also benefited, half-breed that I am, accentuated by Guillermo raising me to hunt and trek. He did so at Maria’s behest, she says, based on her reading of my nature. Accurate, I think.

3.

A huntress like Diana? My mother brought me up on stories of such goddesses, told in her family’s Piranesi dialect. Luca and I speak it with each other. It lends a bit of protection to our frankness. When Franny and I speak it, though, it’s our personal version — a mix of Piranesi Italian, Mendoza Spanish in its San Rafael variant, and Mapudungun, with the addition now of the Spanish of the capital and even the Spanish of Luca’s capital, especially the slang. Languages come easily to us, but I’m a magnet for catchphrases, odd phrases, and the jingles I hear on the street and the radio — snatches of songs, bits of poems and novels. The Mapuche have local dialects that my father and my cousins taught me, growing up, but they have a rich vocabulary that runs parallel to words. It’s also true in the city, how much is conveyed by look or body. Hunting involves silence and attention to things like scent, including your own. The wind is a screen and also a revealer.

And yet I fall into the matriarchal lineage of the Piranesi, a convent school girl who’s now at the university in Buenos Aires, following my mother’s example once she made up her mind to advocate for the Mapuche and others like them. She could have been a lawyer like her mother, but her interests are sociological. Natalia went into the law with the encouragement of her father, but Franny charted her own path. “She has the self-confidence of her grandmother,” Luca says. Can our ancestors’ traits reappear in their descendants? Natalia told me in Piranesi that my mother is so grounded because her father Gio is of Etruscan stock, able to hold his ground no matter what blows through. But it’s really Natalia who’s rooted in Piranesi. My mother’s roots are portable.

4.

I wrote the previous three entries in 1950, when I was 20. It was a heady moment in the capital, filled with promise, but Luca suggested I move to Manhattan, “a better place to end up than Brazil,” as he put it. (I was intrigued by its daring architecture.) He and Marco did business in New York, so they helped me get a visa. I presented myself at the Cooper Union, a venerable institution, focused on engineering, with a small architecture school. I noted my background and my lineage of artists, including Carlo, a maker of monumental artworks, and his wife Giulia, who I described as an Italian cubist. They knew Marco, who comes to Manhattan episodically and is also a fixture in the revived trade fair that draws the architects to Milan. They let me in. My studio mates taught me the ropes, but I have an affinity for form, materials, and fabrication. I envision a form and then work out how to make it. I spent time with the fabricators. I also went to Italy to visit quarries and see the aged Carlo at the country house near Piranesi he shares with Giulia. A miracle being with them and reading his invaluable notebooks.

Carlo admires modernists of pure form, “like sculptors.” He counts some structural engineers among them. (The engineers were among my most interesting teachers.) “If I were starting again, I would design buildings,” he told me. “Buildings and bridges.”

5.

As the last entry suggests, I found this notebook and began adding to it. There are others — an account of my nights out hunting in the bars and clubs of Buenos Aires, written in a kind of shorthand; topical ones made at school; quarrying and notetaking in Italy; and “miscellany.”

My university in Buenos Aires gave women a great deal of freedom, believing that most of us would end up married. Professions were in the picture and it also produced serious scholars like the Church did for women prepared to devote their lives to it. I studied eclectically, feeling that what came readily was likely right for me. The engineering school in Manhattan was idiosyncratic about architecture and content to leave me to my devices. Speaking to my models and drawings, I demonstrated how my ideas could be realized — the materials and fabrication — and why.

Nightly hunting in my university days led me to foreswear this deadly sin. What’s deadly about a sin is its repetition, as shown by the brevity of my entries and the blurred nature of what I remember. Manhattan is a different terrain, a place overpopulated with lions, every young thing a gazelle to be quarreled over. There are lionesses too, but it’s exhausting.

My interactions with Luca were a window onto a family of women who in different ways arranged their lives around their desires. In this same picture were the men who aided them. Together, they formed a persistent lineage, not so much dynastic as attuned to the need for desire itself, as if this cosmic motor kept the world going, which of course it does.

6.

Luca observed the paradox at the heart of our family, its ability to root itself convincingly, marry into whatever was oldest in every new place — Etruscans or Mapuche — and have children whose names and parentage reflected this grafted-on older stock, like Paolo’s vineyards. I’m one such, alive to my individuality among the indigenous. Yet the family is ever on the verge of moving. Part of our mobility is the elasticity of our roots, tendrils that are more like radio waves, my mother thought, enabling her and Natalia to feel connected despite the distance and the gap in time that the war imposed.

“Rooted cosmopolitans” is Luca’s twist on the accusation laid at the Jewish diaspora by those who consider us to be outsiders. No, he argues, we turn up and turn ourselves into insiders. For my own initial foray into architecture, I attached myself to one of the lions as a form-maker. Not the only one, of course, and my presence was resented by some of the men. It made me see how remarkably free of this my school was. These men view women as accessories to take to parties, to fuck, to raise their children, to run the house. It’s also true of the city’s artists and writers, mostly lions or would-be lions.

I have no patience with these situations. When a fabricator I knew, Tino, asked me to join him, I accepted. He knew Marco in Rome before the war, a friendship they revived. I met him while still a student. He taught me how to bring beauty and strength out from the materials. After Carlo expounded on this in Piranesi, I brought his lessons back to Manhattan, intent on applying them.

7.

Humanity falls into two categories that usually overlap and less often are distinct. What marks the family is its awareness of this and its constant efforts to find ways around it or mitigate the damage it can cause to self and others, unresolved.

The categories have to do with self-interest and whether it is seen in a narrow, parochial sense or more broadly. The former can be individual or tribal, while the latter sees past these identities to acknowledge how bound up we are in the lives of others. The former prowl the territory they hope to dominate; the latter view it as artisans and gardeners do: a future engendered in a fertile, collaborative present.

It means thinking of time itself as the unfolding of seasons and of our lives within them. Modernity in Manhattan shrugs this off, muscling through its brutal winters and summers with heat, air-conditioning, and lubricant. Elsewhere, life adapts, collectively remembering times of abundance and stress. Such living accumulates and contributes knowledge. The locals favor modesty over hubris for self-protection.

Is this Manhattan or is it any big, modern city where men and women, full of themselves, disregard others, even their own children, fueled by alcohol, cigarettes, diet pills, the rest? A few are monsters. Most are just people I want to avoid.

The cosmopolitan nature of our family leads us to be local wherever we make our landfall, to look for openness — “heart” as Cosima put it, describing Milan, a local culture in her view despite presenting itself on a grand scale. I see it here too, the best of it, like Tino, talking with his clients the way Paolo talks wine or my father horses. These men see women and children (and lovers and friends) as family, not possessions. The atmosphere is supportive and they make room in their lives so that new things, like our workshop, can take form.

The overlap I mentioned comes with experience. Few of us are saints (and saints are a pain in the ass, Luca observed). A lot of our self-awareness comes from others’ responses to our behaviors. We learn from this, although occasionally too late.

8.

Carlo described how his studio became a factory, now run by Marco as a workshop of artisans. Marco cultivated a network of architects and designers, extending fr0m manufacturing to bespoke fabrication. Tino and I turned to him to transform our small workshop into something more substantial. Marco gave us capital and his imprimatur. Tino suggested we open our new workshop in the Brooklyn Naval Yard, a vast set of redundant buildings that he reasoned would be undisturbed as Manhattan grew. We kept the old workshop as a staging area and meeting place with clients. I built a tiny studio for myself in the Brooklyn workshop. I live here, which is illegal and quite conducive to my work.

For an architect, or whatever it is I’ve become, scale is an issue. Most architects apprentice with practices that work at the scale that interests them, often with a specialty. When I produced forms on demand for the lion, part of the tedium of it was the repetition of buildings in response to the market. Materials were dictated by cost, so conflicts arose between ambition for form and the means to achieve it. If one begins a project with a clear sense of its constraints, it’s possible to produce something good, but the reverse situation makes at best for compromise and at worst disaster.

What Tino and I have in mind is to tie form to fabrication so the conversations with clients are always about what it takes to realize the desired ambition. Experimentation is also in play, trying out new materials to understand them — a lab in collaboration with others and a testbed for manufacturers.

Form is partly illusory — its effects can depend on distance or vary depending on one’s vantage point. Stage sets and film sets exploit this, a fact not lost on architects and decorators. If a form is tied to momentary fashion, its fabrication should focus on effect. If endurance is the object, then the form itself is the focus and everything has to serve this.

9.

When I finally received my Etruscan chart from Nora, she explained how those five columns of symbols were made and what they meant. “We think of it as a commentary on the game we’re born into, among a cohort of people who are also players.” Everyone, she added, finds herself in similar straits, but we have the benefit of a chart that isn’t predictive, no, it’s more about our nature and that of significant others. It’s not clear if their significance is good or bad, nor can we even be sure that this one or that one is significant. “Life throws facsimiles at you,” she said. “It’s why we consider it a game. There must be some other plane where everyone meets to sort out who was who and make up the next one. But having a chart is an advantage that we pass on to our descendants.”

I’m 30. Since arriving in New York City, I haven’t had a lover. The lions put me off. I spend my days with my clients and collaborators, and my nights dreaming of forms. Episodically, I immerse myself in my sources. The churches at home were early ones, but form is everywhere. Lineage is another given — vines that emerge through the floorboards when I set my forms aside and dream of other things.

10.

Piranesi after a long while, the culmination of a journey that began when Marco telephoned. I flew Alitalia to Rome and we met. He plans to shift to Milan and wants me to head it up. What about New York? “It will be okay!” Well, let me ponder this, I said. In principle, yes, I added, to my own surprise. A big smile and nodding head. I took the train to Piranesi, where I’m staying with Natalia. I visited Giulia and Carlo, who both seem much frailer.

I called on Nora. She’s so open and frank about life, how we try to fit into it and at the same time exert our will to get what we need. “All the arrangements your family has made for you are about your work, because that’s your ruling passion. When I was in San Rafael before the war, I spoke with your grandmother Maria. She told me that some hunters’ prowess leads them to disdain any power that assumes they owe it deference, not from pride but self-confidence. She was glad your father raised you as he did. ‘Just as I was.’”

11.

I’ve turned myself inside-out, I note. Holed up in my little studio in Brooklyn has given way to holding court in Milan. Not that I was a recluse exactly, but my role has changed. I now run the creative side of the business Carlo established. Here I am at 33, an industrial designer. I still think of myself as an architect, free under that title to design whatever, but I like this new title’s factory connotations. At my suggestion, we put ours in Modena, where they originally made airplanes and then switched to making sports cars. Like San Rafael, it has two rivers and a mountain range nearby. I bought a country house there, inserting another small studio into the factory. We bought a flat in Milan big enough to entertain that serves as a showroom for what I generate in the office/studio below. I’m teaching at the polytechnic. Every two months, I go back to New York to tend to things there. Thank God for jets!

Postwar Italian workers are Communists, but their party is splintering. Our family is bourgeois, ever and always, relying on fair dealing and epic flexibility. Artisans are their own men and their products are bespoke. I want to bring some women in and start designing for the mass market. Bespoke induces a wider desire is what I’m seeing. We need to do both.

12.

I need a wife. A husband is optional. Perhaps a couple who could raise the children? I daydream about this. I’m not sure it matters if the children are mine or theirs. I crave domestic life the way I crave the countryside. This is where my desire’s gone. Where is my Nora? Natalia’s arrangement made such sense, but I don’t actually crave another lover, just affection.

I’m on the hunt for one or ones, or open to that. Is this hunting, to be open? It’s not an idle question. Hunting, my father taught me, is a long game. It’s one we play together, hunter and hunted, and neither of us is exclusively one or the other, despite our delusions. I suppose that yes, it’s hunting.

Everything is a long game — I think all my lines of descent would agree with this. We play to keep the game going. And children are part of this, aren’t they? We need new players.

Recently, I read about William Morris. He tried to extend bespoke to ordinary goods, to give solidity and beauty scale. His only real success was Liberty, fabrics anyone could buy. Wallpaper, too. I read his News from Nowhere. He loved women, but they were unreliable, so, back to his loom or to Iceland to heal his wounds. Not a lion, a man. I want one. (We’ll both need a wife if I’m going to get anything done.)

In Brooklyn, I worked out as I drew or modelled them how to fabricate a variety of forms. That process drew as much attention as the forms themselves, because the art of making there is hit or miss. In Italy, that form-giving and form-making are tied together is a long tradition, part of the culture. How to give it scale is the issue, as it was for Morris.

13.

My polytechnic colleague Alessandro asked me to dinner and I met a young Japanese couple, Yukiko and Hiro. I was struck by her, so flamboyantly Italian. Sandy told me that Hiro is on some Japanese company’s long leash. “They send them to Milan for two years and then they reel them in.”

I was so taken with Yukiko that I asked them to stay with me in the country. Meanwhile, I asked Marco to take Hiro to lunch, show him our office/studio and the current line, note our factory in Modena. When I fetched them, we stopped off there to look around, then had lunch with the couple who run it for us. It was a holiday, so their return to Milan could wait.

They had a cottage to themselves and came over for meals. Ludo, half of the Modena couple, took Hiro into the back country to hike. Yukiko and I had lunch together on her little terrace. Unexpectedly, she burst into tears. The return home weighed on her like a death sentence. “You don’t know,” she said. “Here, we’re both free. There, I won’t be. My life will narrow down to nothing. Hiro will soon forget me, coming home late and drunk like the others, likely having a mistress.” It seemed melodramatic, but it was clear she meant it.

Ko and Ro, as I call them, are part of what’s forming in my head, a cooperative of many parts linked by mutual trust and shared ambition. I picture an enterprise focused on what we need, what we want, what we desire, what we dream — “what we,” in short, with couples like Ko and Ro personifying it, “it” being their young lives, but with others appearing over time as we add to our lines.

“No,” I said, “I won’t stand for it! You’ll stay here with us.”

14.

Form, my preoccupation, is nothing without a context. At any scale, what we notice is what’s around it, how any one thing is part of something larger, or isn’t — too different from the rest or unworthy of them or they of it. My sense that my Milan flat is a showroom is exactly right — what appeals to people is the total picture, the effect a place provides, more than the objects, more even than the enclosure, but each one fits even if it’s added later, as we bring it to life, living in it. The tendency of designers is to linger on the object, details thought to be important, and of course they are important, an art to their making, proof of proficiency — all we hammer into students at the polytechnic — but animation wins the day, the eye seduced by beauty in motion, which life itself brings out.

When I realized this, I called Marco to tell him we have to revise how we present it all. Nothing without its place and no place without a family that suits it, a couple, a child or two as proof of happiness and fecundity, the coziness of winter, spring’s reopening, warm summer, autumn’s harvest. Our products can live with others, with artwork, houses, any plausible thing to fill out a picture, tell a human story.

It liberates me, this shift. I feel so much is cold, but life is warm and colorful, softer, slower. Yes, city life, but a balcony and greenery, a country place. They’re bourgeois at heart, these moderns, dreaming in spite of the industrial nightmare. It takes me back to Morris, holding art up to the factories, giving women Liberty, patterns steeped in effusive nature. I think that everything is about to heat up. Not always good.

15.

Thirty-eight. My son Trent is four, his sister nine weeks. I named him Trent after my favorite of his father’s works. Gianni gave our daughter a name from his family, Carolina, so a family now, presided over by the WhatWe co-founders, this coop and emporium whose ads run in magazines and on the TV, our ideas and his photos and films. Everything we make arises from the laboratory we’ve created with Ko and Ro, this incidental couple I encountered at the polytechnic like Trent’s father, stopping off to give a lecture. Was it luck or estrus? Both, probably, and he rose to it. Not the first, I learned, but I never followed up nor did he inquire. It’s fine. Trent is his own man, solid as his lineage suggests.

Natalia is ecstatic. Nora, too. Both baptisms were held in Piranesi. Gianni is very familial, better than me on this score, never rushed by time. I lost some of my famous patience, but he’s given it back to me, barn cat that I seem to be, or barn lioness. I needed that old lion to give me a son, while Lina was from pure affection for my children’s father.

A laboratory, I call it, because the ideas emerge from the lives of these others, a network loosely or tightly involved in the coop. Ro is one of the main designers, but Ko is a genius at needs, wants, and desires. We raise our kids together. Her babies drew their grandparents, inevitably, and all was forgiven. Even Ro’s old company now pays him homage.

16.

A few years ago, I saw the film Red Desert. Everything I do aims to be the reverse of that and to reverse it, since it has a certain truth about where postwar life has brought us. Most designers read Domus, but I prefer Abitare because it seeks out what’s alive amid these horrors. It takes courage to make architecture these days and imagine it will be used in an optimistic spirit and not as background to something more appalling, even as we look on, decked out in the latest style.

My students pass tracts around declaring work is bunk and society a spectacle. They eye me suspiciously, maker of ads to seduce unwary housewives, agent of the bourgeoisie, yet the Czech spring came and was suppressed. Ex-colonial wars continue, and they idealize one side and demonize the other. I throw them off, talking about the Mapuche and the Jews in my lineage. Jesus has a high standing in the family, though, even with my father, owing to His willingness to point to the heaven within us, our neighbor as ourself, loaves and fishes if they’re needed. Our allegiance to this reformer has kept us modest, wary of hubris, grateful for our good fortune in the midst of life with its constant potential for the opposite.

I gather ideas, dream of forms and reforms. I’m still an architect, ready to do anything, and an optimist — indeed, a mother of two, keeping humanity going despite the papers, the news as hawked by the different parties. Ko is happy, so that’s one good thing I’ve managed to do. At least, she seems happy. The Japanese have their own nightmares, which she sometimes recounts. Aware of what’s suppressed at home, she makes herself read about it. I admire her for this. When bad dreams put the rest on the side for a moment, when these remembered terrors get to her, we talk about it.

17.

In the film Never on Sunday, which I saw when I was 30, the Piraeus prostitute played by Melina Mercouri gives tragedies a happy ending — “They all go to the seashore.” I remember from my university days that Euripides had two versions of Iphigenia, unable to leave her to her wretched fate. The postwar order is unraveling and people are taking to the streets. Life dogs us and yet the beach is still there.

Ko and I corral our children, tend our kitchen garden, feed the animals — some pets and others here as food, or both, as a child makes pets of everything, including objects like a pencil to which he apologizes and even cries if in rage he breaks it. I take out my notebook and we talk, I sketch. We ask ourselves what might relieve even for a moment the gravity of living, lift us a little from the floor, the bed, stove, sink — the everyday in which we live, a scene of pleasure if we can bring it out a bit.

Recently, unexpectedly, I was asked to design a creche. It came not long after I made a pilgrimage to a grove said once to be the site of a temple to the huntress. No sign of it, but it must have been there since I got the call. Yes, I said. Yes.

Putting my notebook down, I said to Ko, you must come with me. I need you there like I need you here, to give words to the forms that come to me from God knows where, attach them to the way you catch reality, as this helps me see it too.

In these moments, I realize that I love Ko as I’d longed to in my hunting days when I only saw their slim bodies and heard the songs they sang to me as they shed their flimsy clothes. I no longer hunt, but my affection is boundless. In this spirit, we’re designing a creche for the working women of Modena, a gift of the namesake maker of sports cars.

I forgot that Ko is instantly recognizable from the ads, so why exactly was she here? But then, “We’ll need eight staff, eight mothers, and eight children as informants, first on their own and then mixed groups,” said crisply, like an order, in Ko’s perfect Milanese. Yes, they nodded. I was impressed.

18.

IMy father and I took the children and flew to Santiago, then went inland to the Andes. Maria joined us at the compound they use to hunt or when San Rafael is too hot. I wanted Trent and Lina to know them. We spoke a mix of Spanish and Mapudungun. The children have heard it before. Like me, they have an ear for language.

I also wanted Maria to read my children, which she did, slipping into a trance and then speaking while I took notes.

The journey let my past seep in as dreams of trekking and my father teaching me to hunt. I was a predator then, hungry but patient. In Buenos Aires, the sight of flesh only made me hungrier. Back in Modena, Diana appears in my dreams to remind me of my vows, even if I gave myself to men. She speaks the same Milanese as Ko, I realize, only showing up after I understood that Ko was my much-desired wife.

The creche is nearly finished, a ring hovering above the old building and its courtyard. They loved it, they said, but it was too small. What a shame to move although the donor offered them a site. I saw a solution. To convince him of it, I noted that a Turin carmaker has long had a racetrack on its roof.

19.

Letters from my mother and Luca. Military coups are likely. Paolo can likely ride it out, but my mother’s visible activism will make her vulnerable if the government shifts rightward. Her work is backed by liberal Catholic reformers, who are at odds with the military. My father is subject to the colonial assumption that the natives will turn treacherous. (We were never conquered!) Luca has a different problem — a denizen of cafés in both cities, he’s befriended many intellectuals, publishing some of them, and has had run-ins with their opponents. As always with Luca, he’s the odd man out — not unlike what he faced in Piranesi long ago, so it’s time for him to move on. My mother has a standing offer from the UN in Paris. Paolo assured my father that they race horses and play polo in France and England, so he’ll be in demand. Luca will return to Piranesi with Laura and his sisters, but their sons will stay on in Montevideo.

Milan is unsure what to do next. Broad license was given to its postwar rebuilders and the results are mixed, as the Milanese have noticed. Politics is again cynical and corrupt in turns. In the midst of this, the industrial designers set out their wares: desks, chairs, typewriters, wall calendars with their nubile women. Sports cars drive quickly past the blank suburban towers while the train takes me back to Modena. Soon after, I’m again in the countryside’s slower tempo.

20.

My parents are in Paris. My father is much in demand in the same circles he catered to in Argentina. He’s very striking in his tailored suits. My mother finds the UN sluggish and subject to Cold War politics, but is popular with her peers. As a precaution, they’ve both become French citizens. At home, if I can still use that word, things are getting worse. Heavy, someone said — the atmosphere is leaden: melts in the heat, but not immediately; accumulating, it induces madness. Paolo bought a vineyard in Santa Barbara, my mother said, fulfilling a dream Luca had decades ago to extend the family’s enterprise to California.

Our creche wins an award. At Ko’s suggestion, we reduced our fee in exchange for access to the creche in operation as a source of ideas and testbed for new products. Its publication has led to new commissions, including a maternity clinic that we intend to design in our conversational way, ferreting out what’s needed and how to support it. I want to make it an open-ended vessel, as the field is changing rapidly. How do you accommodate these changes in such a sacred space? Medical science aims to thwart outliers like infertility, the tendency to miscarry, premature or hard births, defects. A clinic will be in constant motion, but I want a calm like the old hospitals attached to convents. Its garden’s grove will honor my personal virgin as well at the Holy Mother.

These mothers and babies distract me from the terrorists. Public gatherings draw them, and airplanes attract hijackers. It’s mostly inconvenient unless you end up tortured or in pieces. I tell myself it will get better. Bourgeois optimism is in my blood, despite my cocktail of lineage.

21.

My father visited. “A Frenchman now,” he said. “They call me Guillaume. They like horses and also eat them, like us,” meaning the Mapuche, whose language we mostly spoke together, throwing in the other languages we’ve acquired. We’re all sponges in this respect, taking on the trappings of wherever in the cosmos we find ourselves.

We spoke of hunting and how readily I took to it. His mother told him to take me. “She was right, you were born to it.” My father knows horses like a country doctor knows his villagers. It doesn’t occur to the horses to be afraid of him. He’s like a barn cat, only interested in the mice or a nap. A hunter, they grasp, but not of them, so unthreatening, calm.

“An odd life,” he said. “Our land seemed endless, then we lost it, then it was restored in part. I went along. I had good luck — Paolo and Franny were gifts to a landless peasant. And I went along when Franny found her way to Paris. ‘There are horses in France,’ Paolo assured me, and there are. Many.”

Is this Luca’s “flexibility”? My father meant something more — the flux we live in, how a territory we took for granted slipped away, yet it’s there and we slip back in or recreate it. Flux is a horse from colt to pasture or glue or a meal. Not so different for us. Go with it, I think, but what, who, where? Born to it, my grandmother said. A huntress or a barn cat? Estrus works its magic on the cats, but Diana was a virgin, patroness of wild animals, protectress of women giving birth.

22.

The forms of things well up in me and how they might best be made follows along. I have a talent for finding others who fill out both sides of my endeavors. Fill in is more accurate, as I’m constantly leaving them to run what I’ve started so I can move on to something else. I still cross the ocean to spend time in Brooklyn but I’m so close to Tino and my colleagues there that a great deal is transacted by long distance, cheaper than the flights, and by sketches and notes air-freighted between us.

In Modena, we work things up from sketches and conversations. Ludo and Ro run the products end. The buildings Ko and I do with a small team, working with the best builders I can find. My approach is simple: create a volume to contain the constant variety of human experience, flexed as it is by human progress. Since everything inside will change, the vessel has to appear solid but remain open and porous. Aldo Rossi categorizes such buildings as artifacts, able to accommodate new uses over centuries, beloved by their communities, yet not monuments. A creche or clinic has this same possibility of evolving in ways that no one anticipated.

I continue to design embellishments that add beauty to the settings where people gather. Form plays off form here, an elaboration or a counterpoint to my work or another’s. Part of the pleasure of this work is exploring materials and their possibilities. We have to ask them, as the maestro says.

23.

Dear maestro, your letter awaited me at the polytechnic, written on the stationery of your hotel in Calcutta, mailed from there. You needn’t have apologized for the long silence. It was enough to know that I was in your thoughts, that our memories proved coincident around your central theme.

Thank you for that compliment and also for noting how much you liked the creche. I like your “affinity,” better than influence. Had you made it back here I could have shown it to you and introduced you to your son, but your letter reached me a day after I read that you were dead, a death almost anonymous apparently until it wasn’t. It makes your letter more of a treasure, doesn’t it? A son is one way I remember his father, gave him a different form that, being human, surprises me with gestures and ideas that speak of influence, to use that word appropriately — what you gave him at the outset of his making, this remembered encounter.

You saw our creche in Casabella, you wrote, praising the photos. My husband did a remarkable job of bringing it alive. My anticipation led me to agree to a marriage with a suitable father, as our son would need one and you, maestro, were elsewhere. My elders are dying off and now you’ve joined them, constant motion foreshortening a life that should have run on forever. Your helpers will see through any work that’s pending. I have them, too. We didn’t write — there was no need — still, wonderful to get this unexpected letter, to know that in a Calcutta hotel, reading a magazine you brought along, I came back to you. To give our affinity human form I needed your collaboration, so, thank you. I couldn’t live without our boy Trent, a credit to us both.

24.

My parents bought an old farmhouse in the foothills east of Modena, higher up, its grounds opening out to woods. I helped them renovate it and often go hiking with my father, on our own or with the children. When it’s just us two, we reminisce about the Andes. He misses them, but appreciates the Apennines as equally old territory. He’s himself in the mountains, calm amid predators and prey, assuring the locals they need both to keep the balance nature intends — this said in Italian with a trace of Piranesi, which confuses them until they meet Franny. We sometimes break into Mapudungun, then explain that we’re discussing hunting in the Andes. This lends added authority to our recommendations, as it should.

My mother is helping Natalia pull her papers together — the record of a respected lawyer and judge, editor of her cousin’s famous trilogy and keeper of a journal that goes back to her convent school days. They’re all getting older. Paolo sends Franny snapshots from California and when she sees them, she asks aloud if things will ever change in Argentina. News reaches her from there and it’s mostly dreadful.

25.

How far back into childhood does my vow go? Is Diana the patroness of every wild thing, even the ones in the hedges? I suspect so. And where does childhood end? Too few carry its spirit into adulthood, resisting its mechanical stupor. We get inquiries from schools that follow children over an extended period and base their pedagogy on careful observation. I admire their pragmatism, grounded in a spiritual sense of what childhood is, the miracle of being here at all. Most schools are museums, preserving an idea of schooling that is frighteningly old, despite their modern wrapping. There’s a sense that modernism is at an impasse. I’m not entirely convinced, but occasionally you have to throw a big thing over to see if it can right itself. While it lies there, waving its legs, we’ll get some terrible buildings, I imagine, but some interesting decoration, a pastiche of the past simplified or overlaid, collages made without much understanding.

Whatever we design, we imagine people living with it. Technology changes, but the form it takes can still persist. Talking with the clinicians, we saw how to redesign their equipment to make it easier to use and less intimidating to their patients. Not long after, we were off talking licensing with the Swiss. We stayed at the Kraft, where I gazed at the Rhein. Terror passed through Mulhouse, “but that’s in France,” our hosts assured us as we haggled over terms.

26.

My mother sees the Malvinas War as a spat about honor as the protagonists understand it. “Argentina will lose, which may hasten the revival of democracy. Only idiots like them, possessing arbitrary power, would start a war like this, thinking they’d get away with it. The English, Mrs. Thatcher in particular, are offended, which provides her own hotheads with a shining moment.” Meanwhile, Chile cements its dictatorship. Is this the fate of these countries? For the Mapuche, there’s no border — they still hunt on both sides of the Andes, come and go as always, yet the countryside is more dangerous — guerillas and partisans, some local and others fleeing there to regroup. Mendoza is vulnerable, but San Rafael probably isn’t, she thinks.

In the capital, I imagine life goes on despite crackdowns and violence. What sparks the desire to talk, dance, and have sex is inertial. The atmosphere is likely more destructive. Some will self-combust faster who would otherwise drink and smoke themselves to a slower death, but the survivors will write their novels, poems, and memoirs. Truth will out.

According to Luca, our family’s women burned through desire in something like an organized way. (Is the lion in this tradition? I think so.) In the past, it was organized for them. In my generation, I had to do it myself, although much else was organized for me. And our Carolina, will she be left to her own devices? She won’t have Luca to help her, alas!

27.

Women can hunt each other, but with men, we’re expected to allow ourselves to be hunted. This is how I would restate my youthful practice as an axiom. Thoughts in this vein come to me when I take a train. The rhythm of the tracks triggers it. Freud associated trains with penetration, yet that’s not exclusively gendered, is it? Slender hands and long fingers — these thoughts don’t induce me to haunt bars as I once did.

An architect, a woman, won a competition recently with an entry that drew my attention. It looked challenging to build, and I started sketching how I’d do it. Such thoughts also arise on trains — I do a lot of work between these two cities. The architect’s entry is all form, I noted. I never stop there, but wonder about form’s raw matter as well as its poetics. These notebooks are my cookbooks, filled with what I’ve gleaned from visits to quarries and factories, from the conversations Ko and I have with informants, them talking, me sketching.

28.

Two years ago, Calvino spoke at a Buenos Aires book fair. My mother noted it, a sign of Argentina returning to normal. He died a year ago. I like his books. Some are fables that we read to the children when they were young. We’ve done well. I could afford to stop, but I get new commissions that spawn new lines of products, while Gianni’s projects find backers. His adaptation of Cosima’s trilogy is a big hit here and in Latin America. I wish they were all still alive to see it!

We only take on a building project if a group of people is identified who will spend a good part of their future in it. Whatever form it takes will arise from a context fleshed out with opinions and interpretations by those who best grasp what matters: how they live with each other and with their surroundings, including nature, such as it is these days. They know the coldest cold, the hottest hot, and all the pleasures in between. We generate the building together, along with a host of product ideas prompted by talk and observation.

29.

My father decided in favor of the Apennines. “The family has infected me,” he said, in that ironic voice that mixing with the Europeans has given him. As my mother predicted, the war over the Malvinas ended up toppling the regime. The horrors may be over, but the nightmares will continue. She blames it on Peron — good for Argentina and then bad for it as he was blind to or unable to resist the military’s corrupt, reactionary, and ultimately treacherous rule.

Any discussion of Argentina reminds me of Luca. When I was adrift in Buenos Aires, which was often the case, there he was at the dock or rowing out to find me. Less a question of desire, I was thrown by an unexpected death, inexplicable to me and yet demanding that I unravel it. I was disoriented, which was also an entirely new and unsettling feeling. Luca promised me that it would pass, that I would find the thread like Theseus in the labyrinth. He also pointed to my talents and told me it was high time to take them on the road.

30.

An academic couple lectured at the polytechnic and then visited me in Modena. Their term for my work is “critical regionalism.” But no, I protested, surely I can claim to be cosmopolitan? From their replies I gathered that one foot in the cosmos permits the criticality, while the other foot rests securely in the local. After they left, I thought about it. The creche has two antecedents — the beloved old building, with its stone walls, and the bespoke carmakers. Ro and I have engaged them in a running dialogue about the potential of the new materials. Modena’s carmakers built airplanes before the war, and race cars have much in common with them.

For the upper part of the creche, lightness and strength were paramount to avoid overloading the original building, not just physically but visually. Stonework’s solidity is partly an illusion, as earthquakes remind us. The clinic is almost a stage set for this reason. Is it postmodern, I wonder, in its conscious inauthenticity, or simply modern? Is it regional?

Ettore Sottsass’s gorgeous Olivetti is on my desk. He’s part of a movement that makes colorful sculptures that double as household furniture. Memphis, it’s called, splitting with function but not quite. Function. like a Catholic wife, doggedly opposes divorce no matter how flamboyantly her husband provokes her, cavorting with Sottsass’s strumpets.

31.

When I look around me, I conclude that “late modernist” best describes me among the labels the magazines paste onto architects. It’s a return to form after a fling with exposing the parts, reviving the engineers’ aesthetic that Paxton and Brunel favored. Reyner Banham was its theoretician, but Archigram and the Metabolists got there first. I like Piano and Rogers’ one in the Marais, but I resisted turning buildings inside-out.

What makes me late modern is the way I cleave to purpose, and plumb the depths of materials and assemblies as I give it form. Form is how a building comes together, just as humans do. Beauty is in the form and the possibilities it embodies.

This last sentence also captures what I sought in bars and bedded in rented rooms, moving from one to another to hide my tracks and then retreating to the women’s dormitory to cool down, a typically doubled life in a city just big enough to pull it off. From what Luca told me, this wasn’t so unusual among the family’s women. “Your mother is the exception.”

Whenever I see a crescent moon rising, I think of my goddess in her grove and the babies, mothers, and wildlife she protects. No virgin, clearly, I still honor her when I can. Recently, asked by my father, I designed some huts in the Apennines, shelters for hikers and larger quarters for its stewards, as it needs them now to give voice to its wants and complaints. I’m out there listening, letting what I see and hear give form to these small buildings, built traditionally by locals and then filled with whatever’s useful, containers for life itself. Is this what they mean by “critical regionalism”?