There seem to be two promising avenues for Italian architecture nowadays. The first aims to humanize technology, taking its cue from Mario Cucinella who in turn developed it from his apprenticeship with Renzo Piano. The second is to play the specific qualities of materials for all they are worth, the artist’s rather than scientist’s approach; in this our country is greatly indebted to Herzog & de Meuron. How might one combine the two courses and mould them into one original whole? Such was the question Enrico Iascone set himself in his latest projects, one of which is a newly-finished house in a wood on the outskirts of Bologna. The salient features here are the choice of materials, constructional simplicity, the play of light and colour, and realism. The building stands in extensive grounds and was commissioned to turn a manor-house outbuilding into a guesthouse, somewhere to meet friends in, and let the children play. The necessary volume came from demolishing a hangar for farm machinery, the outline of which had to be preserved - thanks to some quirk of local building commission officiousness. The constraint was got round by bowing to the rules as to shape but ridding the new construction of its former rusticity which would have clashed with real renovation. Again, by adroit landscaping and positioning of windows, a basement was put to good use as sleeping quarters. So despite the small size and obligatory outline, the building was successfully made to fit the original bill. From a formal point of view here the choice of cladding is all: wood panelling painted a dark hue. This dialogues with the surrounding oaks, ashes and maples and heightens the contrast between the organic shapes of nature and the geometrical form of the construction. The strategy is also helped by how the immediate surrounds to the building were handled, avoiding any artificial material like square manufactured paving slabs. The house seems both to pick up some quality of its territory and mark a clean break with it. The house, as it were, stands to nature as an idea stands to a real object. Choice of cladding tied up closely with the construction system adopted. Out of the sunken part in reinforced concrete rises a bearing structure of laminated wooden panels some ten centimetres thick, protected by a wood-fibre sheath about double that thickness. The outer panels are separated by a cavity affording natural ventilation. The idea is a good one since wood can withstand weathering but fears standing water. On-site assembly of parts prepared at the joinery speeded up construction times: the bearing structure was put together in a matter of hours and the whole site was a phase lasting only a few months. Having a single cladding material meant that the sloping roof could be built of the same panels as the vertical elevations. The resulting image is both abstract and of-one-piece - not something achievable with a contrasting roof, say, of terracotta pan-tiles. The building easily makes it into the top bracket of current energy certification: the walls have great insulating power and so do the triple-glazed windows with their double cavity. These are distributed liberally where needed - like the large full-height glass pane of the sitting room bringing nature indoors - but avoided elsewhere. Thin horizontal glass slits pierce two sides, notably just above the kitchen corner; the aim is to achieve light effects and produce unexpected glimpses of sky and surrounds. That result is achieved on the inside; from outside, in my view, they dialogue poorly with the outline of the front door. In contrast with the sombre exterior, the inside is light-coloured. Walls, floors and ceilings are white, the floors being in resin. This contrast picks up the guiding theme of the building: to form aesthetic tension between opposite poles - a house in all its artificial genesis, and nature as an organic system. Iascone’s work is strongly stamped by Mario Cucinella’s lesson on sustainability, and likewise by Herzog & de Meuron’s poetic re-invention of materials. While the Bologna house in the wood seems to sketch a first convincing combination of the two themes, the Smart House at Sassuolo may go one better. This villa - still at the building-site stage - is destined for the Sassuolo entrepreneur who invented the process for manufacturing porcelain stoneware. Its hallmark is to be its cladding, which exploits a latest-generation laminate prepared in the customer’s own factory. This will support sheets of stoneware up to three metres tall, one metre wide and a mere 3 millimetres thick. The roofing will use a variant on the same cladding, on which photovoltaic film will be factory-mounted. This dark monolith of a house is to be cleft by a few clean sculptural incisions. Iascone wants a crystalline shape and is counting on the visual effect of his material, a minimalist approach to form and the ability to turn the object into an objet d’art, in the footsteps of Herzog & de Meuron. Yet the artist is here justified by function and eco-sustainability: the incisions turn what might be an over-compact volume into two building units, each gaining exposure on the best sides, south and east, and achieving energy class A into the bargain. The house at Sassuolo is to have doors and window surrounds in burnished brass, underscoring the sculptural quality, and floors in slat-shaped sand-coloured Brazilian stone. Simplex materials are have been designed for the Abruzzese Health Residence at Sant’Egidio alla Vibrata. A previous building is being converted to house communal areas and facilities, while a new three-storey block will contain 60 bedrooms. The main façade of this will be punctuated with wooden posts serving to support each guestroom’s personal balcony. The rear façade will be prefabricated in concrete panelling, scored at intervals by strips of glazing via which the abutting corridor system will gain natural light. A glass-encased winter garden will act as go-between for the old and new parts, serving as an assembly point as well as a walk-through. One recently completed Iascone work is the Case Bianche residence in downtown Bologna. Here by rigorous use of white - walls, ceilings, floors - twelve attractive apartments have been carved out of a building that used to be smothered inside a 1950s tenement block. The white is patterned by natural light: for example, slits in the entrance-hall wall and ceiling allow a rear-lighting effect. Apparently random in their pattern, the slits actually correspond to a line of trees taken from a photo: their exact outline was laser-cut onto a supporting-wall and metal false-ceiling. Luigi Prestinenza Puglisi