As we know by now, the mannerist phase—defined throughout this book as an inescapable stage in any author’s artistic career—shows some forms of exasperation of the traditional aesthetic categories as well, that slip into provocation or revolution. The mannerist phase rarely succeeds in defining a style, it is rather a period of contestation, rich in revolutionary ideas, transient yet formative. This condition can be reread in contemporary artistic culture, saturated with images, which seems to fall prey to a Peter Pan syndrome. The bizarre, the sophisticated, and the chunky have been identified as characteristic aspects of the contemporary mannerist condition.

Mario Botta’s long and articulate work leads us to consider the difference between sophistication and whimsy. An architect and founder of the Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio, Botta has worked since the early years of his career on the theme of residential space, building a series of single-family houses in Canton Ticino. His series of houses constitutes an unparalleled craft workshop where themes, formal solutions, and a repertoire of images are experimented, tested and finally applied or transferred to other projects. In later years, the topic of the series reappears in Botta’s complex work on sacred space, so much so that it can be said that in some ways he continues to build houses.

In his work, mannerism often appears in the form of self-referentiality; for this reason, Botta may appear, in the eyes of some, as a mannerist of himself. In this regard, a conversation between Botta and Francesco Dal Co about one of Botta’s early works, the House in Breganzona, proves valuable. At the heart of the discussion is Dal Co’s assumption that the formal excesses of this building are the corollary of a formal experimentation aimed at making the image of the house a source of wonder, reducing architecture to a mask. But before turning to Botta’s response, it should be pointed out that the architect has always maintained that a natural environment becomes truly meaningful only if it incorporates artifice. “My house in Breganzona wants to affirm this right/duty for architecture to produce images capable of shaking indifference—Botta answers—presenting itself almost as a ‘totem’ in an environment that seems to be sinking into banality.” 

Like a few architects, Botta tends to make his own work sophisticated, that is, to pursue the creation of masterpieces. It is possible to create a masterpiece through a few very simple moves, but he prefers to pursue his goal through a singular complexity of craftsmanship. In his work, complexity is expressed through the careful manipulation of form, the skillful use of light, and the choice of the finest construction techniques. 

If Botta’s architecture takes us back to the classical concept of a building as a unitary organism, composed of parts that merge into a unified whole, the last few years are marked—according to historian Mario Carpo—by discreteness and chunkiness. This is the result of processes of assemblage which give way to the heteroclite, “a whole that is made of discernible, discrete, or separate parts.” Similarly to the IKEA “kit of parts,” the attribute heteroclite has become extremely popular today as it represents the paradigm of assembly and DIY. Anyone can assemble an IKEA kit of parts, which is probably why architecture has become an assembly process, not even too sophisticated and indeed often a bit crude to meet market economies. The concept of chunkiness expresses precisely the rhapsodic character of the architecture of our time, made up of discrete and assembled objects, often characterized by imperfection. The assemblage process happens often without excessive sophistication, so that each element is always distinguishable and the final touch—the polishing, the refinement—is completely absent, deemed unnecessary. 

If during the 20th century chunkiness mirrors the discreteness of collage and brutal cut-and-paste techniques, ending up expressing a utilitarian, unrefined, materialistic, and premechanistic view of the world, today the work of offices like Fala Atelier, Gambardella Architetti and especially MOS consists of creating “cute chubby objects,” which are the manifesto of a style-not-style. In the words of MOS founders Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample, “We didn’t want fancy or expensive. We wanted to avoid something. We numbered. We repeated. We repeated with slight differences. We wanted to be personal without being expressionist.” These words come close to those of Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi, who criticized the mannerist expressionism of Paul Rudolph, instead considering themselves mannerists because of their use of conventional elements in an unconventional way. 

MOS’s work is non-compositional and makes use of assemblage techniques, derived from American vernacular architecture, which is admittedly practical and metaphor-free, even familiar, ordinary, and conventional. However, the use of the pitched roof and standing seam aluminum cladding—that identify all their constructions—goes beyond vernacular architecture and reveals the works of Herzog & de Meuron and Stan Allen respectively as Meredith and Sample’s references. 

And before them, Aldo Rossi’s architecture seems to have been a valuable source of interest for MOS, even if Rossi saw domesticity as linked to something primitive, alienating or morbid. Even the theme of the uncanny—what can be understood as simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar—can be detected in the work of MOS, but on closer inspection, the ingenious little monsters designed by this firm seem to descend from John Hejduk’s slightly threatening masks that yearn for communal values. MOS’s houses, in particular, are objects that look like they were drawn by a child, with plans treated as diagrams, which become the very hallmark of their authorship. Although aggregated, the architectural volumes designed by this firm—narrow and long spaces like mannerist galleries, filled with objects and furniture placed in unusual settings—always remain recognizable in their individuality, as if to say that the family is not a unitary system but is made up of many individualities that should be preserved.