Zambonini Memorial Stone

The Memorial Stone for Giuseppe and Claudia Zambonini, commissioned by Claudia and installed at the Cimitero Monumentale (Verona, Italy) in 2019, is among my most cherished design projects. Steeped in years of conversations with Claudia and materials from The Giuseppe Zambonini Archive, which we established at Parsons/The New School, I arrived at a composition that incorporated motifs from several of Giuseppe’s projects, a favorite tool, and his passion for combining handcraft and new technologies. The waterjet-cut profile of the plumb bob in the stainless steel architect’s set square was drawn directly from the instrument Zambonini used during his design-build renovations to 12 West 29th Street in Manhattan in the early 1980’s. The marble we selected is native to Beppe’s home city of Verona, and was cut by a combination of CNC Router and freehand carving.

The concentric ripples derive from Giuseppe’s drawings for The Reliquary, a ritual structure that appeared to him in a dream. These drawings are permanently exhibited at Parsons School of Constructed Environments as part of The Zambonini Archive. The phrase Ogni pensiero vola (Every thought flies) hails from one of Giuseppe’s favorite places, the Parco dei Mostri in Bomarzo, Italy, where it is drawn (literally) from the lips of a giant, sculpted Ogre, whose mouth offers entry to a grotto. Although l’Orco was built in the 1550’s, the phrase has still deeper origins, being the product of the renaissance game where an aphorism or passage from a well-known poem would be excerpted and transformed to create new meanings. In this case, the source was Dante’s immortal phrase from The Inferno - “lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate” (abandon all hope ye who enter) - which Dante, Virgil and readers encounter at the gate of hell. By a turn of phrase, then, the depths of despair were transformed into a springpoint of inspiration. As reflected in a sketch included above, Giuseppe had intended to include the phrase on an exterior wall at the entrance to their home in Dingman’s Ferry, PA. Elsewhere on the sheet of sketches for the Dingman’s Ferry house we find a variation of Giambattista Vico’s dictum, Verum Ipsum Factum (Truth Through Making), a favorite phrase of Zambonini’s own thesis advisor, Carlo Scarpa, who had incorporated it into the front gate of the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia.