Victoria Miro's Islington Gallery

Interview: Claudio Silvestrin
April 8, 2009 by: Vicky Richardson
A complex and shy personality, Silvestrin keeps a distance from the architecture scene, despite having plenty of high-profile clients. Vicky Richardson met the Italian architect in his London studio as he prepares to publish the first volume of his work in a decade…
‘I’m a lone wolf’, Claudio Silvestrin says of himself. By that he means that he does not hang out on the architecture scene. He is not a networker, a golf player or a talker at public or academic events. All that he describes as the ‘blah, blah, blah’ of architecture. Silvestrin’s architecture is often described as austere, and the term could well be applied to the man himself.

Yet he is revered by clients such as gallerist Victoria Miro, designer Giorgio Armani and rap star Kanye West, all of whom have worked with him over a period of some years and who respond to what they see as a spiritual, elemental quality of his buildings.

Discussing architecture with Silvestrin is not straightforward. He prefers to let his work speak for itself, partly because he is not keen on the way architects constantly promote themselves, but mostly because the intended effect of his work is emotional rather than theoretical or social. It means that he has been somewhat shunned by the academic crowd, though is embraced by those in fashion, art and music.

Silvestrin rarely chases a job: clients come, he says, because they like what he does. ‘Ten out of 10 times, they call me up out of the blue’. That’s how it happened with musician Kanye West, for whom Silvestrin designed a Manhattan loft and a house in LA which was eventually shelved after it was refused planning permission. West is Silvestrin’s favourite type of client: ‘someone who wants to learn, who is ambitious but at the same time aware that they don’t know everything’. Having West as a client is ‘like having a student’ he says. ‘He wants to learn to draw’.

Silvestrin is an artist in the more important sense that ‘his understanding of space is exceptional’, says Miro. Armani too, for whom the architect has worked with on 26 projects, heaps praise on Silvestrin saying that his work has a ‘complexity behind a simplicity that is so unspectacular, so understated, as to render it spectacular’.

These days we’ve become used to architecture being just another branch of the construction industry. Silvestrin, on the other hand, thinks that architecture is a calling, not unlike the preisthood. Today’s profession demands that architects be good communicators, team players and that they must have a social, or at least environmental, agenda. Their capacity for compromise and consultation is celebrated.

Such ideas are anathema to Silvestrin and it is no wonder that he prefers to bury himself in his work. ‘To keep your integrity these days you have to work at it seven days out of seven,’ he says. ‘Mediocrity is everywhere and so everyone has to aim higher’