Prodi Open Issue 09

open: The Prodir Magazine

ISSUE 09,2020

Focus: Extremes

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OPEN AIR

OPEN HOLES

OPEN BALANCE

OPEN FACTORY

The bicycle sure isn’t Ellen’s thing.

Flying is

The Emmentaler Syndrome

Michael Grab, The Stonewhisperer

Donato’s tips

[P. 4]

OPEN DECISION

[P. 20]

Sometimes, no decision is the best decision

A summer house in Ticino

[P. 26]

[P. 40]

OPEN NOVELTY

OPEN ENGINEERING

Airy and light. The new QS40 Air

Somehow, they all run.

Ernesto Oroza’s Rikimbilis

[P. 10] OPEN TRUST

Philipp Kristian Diekhöner on digitalized trust [P. 14]

[P. 38]

[P. 28]

OPEN DOORS

[P. 52]

OPEN BASKET

What if the movie doesn’t stop after it’s over?

[P. 54] OPEN PENS

Writing instruments and novelties at a glance

OPEN DESTINATION

At the next crossing, turn left to the Amazon OPEN NOVELTY

[P. 46]

It comes with minerals: The new QS Stone [P. 34]

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OPEN CONTENTS

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PS

PS: If your copy of Open has arrived without the attached QS40 Air in a subtle Purist Blue – an instrument that delicately dissolves opposing extremes – please let us know.

We’d be happy to send you the pen that accompanies the issue: open@prodir.ch The Prodir Magazine

OPENING

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Dear Readers,

When opposite poles work creatively together, exciting stories emerge. Like that of wingsuit flier Ellen Brennan, for example, who soars through Swiss Alpine valleys at 200 km/h but is still afraid of riding a bike . Or that of architect Daniel Buchner, who transformed a dilapidated stone hut into a beautiful summer house – remaining just as true to its centuries-old structural fabric as he is to his vision of modern architecture . In this, the nineth issue of Open, we’ve decided to focus on the ability to deal with extremes constructively. Trust plays an important role in finding ways to do so. With this in mind, we spoke with Philipp Kristian Diekhöner, author of the book The Trust Economy .

Two very different routes can lead to the same destination; our new writing instruments are testament to this. Our new QS Stone models are produced using 60% less plastic, but weigh an extra 50%, while the new QS40 Air also contains 60% less plastic but has been made significantly lighter. We’ve also decided to tread new paths with the graphic design of Open. When it comes to creating stories you enjoy, however, we haven’t changed a thing. [p. 4]

[p. 40]

[p. 14]

[p. 34]

[p. 10]

I wish you an exciting read, Florian Seidenberg Sales Director, Prodir GmbH

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Riding a bike just isn’t Ellen Brennan’s thing.

Up in the Air Text: Herbert Genzmer Photos: Damien Deschamps, Frødis Ormåsen, Ian Webb

We hear from people who do BASE jumping that they can see colors, hear sounds, perceive the whole world with an intensity never even imagined by common folk. All senses, they say, explode into new dimensions. But these strong sensations come at a risk, and the high number of fatal accidents has prohibited this extreme sport in many countries. The French and Swiss Alps have become the Eldorado for those who seek the edge and who crave to fulfill humanity’s oldest dream: flying. Ellen Brennan does not look like a daredevil, her calm and friendly blue eyes inspire confidence, peace, and not the desire for high octane adrenalin jolts while jumping from high mountains. Ellen Brennan is a wingsuit flyer.

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Ellen Brennan flies with more than 120 mph and is the fastest flying woman on earth. Ellen fulfilled her dream and moved from her native Utah, where she learned to jump into the open air, to the paradise of adrenalin addicts, the Alps. “When I was a kid I was always dreaming about flying and on my 18th birthday I did my first skydive. It was sensational and it was my dad who gave me the idea that I could do it more than once, if I wanted to. After that, one thing just led to the next and before I knew it I was wing-suiting off of cliffs in Switzerland and … (Ellen laughs) … and here I am! You know,” she continues, “I used to dream about running and jumping and flying and now I have dreams of actually flying and being out there, high up in the air.”

OPEN: When did you first use a wingsuit?

ELLEN BRENNAN: Really step by step. I never thought that I would be a wingsuit BASE jumper but it was always … and that sounds kind of ironic when I say it, but safety has always been the most important for me, everything I do I do for safety … (Ellen looks at me, sees the total astonishment in my face and laughs out loud!) Thus the wingsuit.

Nothing is safer than a wingsuit!

Nothing is safer …? (now very serious) I started out with skydiving, we mostly jumped out of hot air balloons and for that I needed a BASE jump parachute, one that opens safely, so I learned how to do BASE jumping and I realized that jumps from cliffs are also really fun, so I jumped from smaller cliffs, but that can be very dangerous, if your chute opens the wrong way you can hit the cliff and get injured, you are simply too close to the ground …

To the ground?

Vertical ground! Walls are ground too, aren’t they?

I get it! So, as long as you are in the air,

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OPEN AIR

everything is great.

Exactly! Which is why I learned how to wingsuit, I wanted to be able to fly out into the middle of the valley as fast as possible and open my parachute in clean airspace.

I have never thought about it this way … in clean and unobstructed air. How does air feel?

It feels really … err, do you mean physically or emotionally?

Both. I want to know if air gets hard, you’re flying at tremendous speed.

The first three seconds of wing-suiting are critical ‘cause you jump off the cliff and you don’t have much air pushing against you, so you can’t really steer … like, in wing-suiting speed is your friend!

So if you have more speed you can steer a lot better. It really takes a few seconds before you start to feel the air on your face and that is usually the first indicator of … wow, I’m flying, I’m gaining speed, I’m safe (laughs) … the wind on your face is a very reassuring feeling.

So there is a transition from free falling to flying?

Yes! The suits fill with air and become

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rigid ... so when you first jump off you don’t have a lot of energy yet, your suit is still soft and you’re kind of at the mercy of the angle you pushed, it is a very sensitive moment, and as you start to fall, your suit fills with air and as it becomes rigid (a broad smile on her face) you can take off and the air … (she laughs and exhales deeply with a soft whistling sound) … and the air is smooth. Is that the right word? How does it feel? … and the air becomes powerful. I can’t say it any other way, it is not really smooth, it is: … (she hesitates a split-second and pronounces the next word slowly and with a strong expression on her face) pure power. Power is what I feel when I jump the air!

I can see you’re smiling when you’re talking about it, it is the way you are smiling in your movies when you’re flying.

Is that a special moment?

It is THE moment! It is pure excitement.

So when this happens with the air, and you go through the motion, is there a point when you say, that element –air– is more my element than anything else?

Yeah … (she laughs nearly shyly) … I mean … its funny, but I feel the most at home when I’m in the air … … at home? Wow! In my notes I wrote: are you comfortable in that element? At home is so much stronger.

It is, because when I’m in the air, I feel that I can relax and I feel safe, and yes, I

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OPEN AIR

feel comfortable and at home! For me, air is the most empowering element in the world.

Are you ever afraid? Do you know fear?

I was always terrified of riding bikes.

(Ellen does not laugh) Bicycles?

Yes! And I started taking classes with the little kids and learned how to ride a bike. I can do it now, but I am still frightened, I mean, really, you are so close to the ground, all the dirt and things, everything is so unpredictable, there could be a rock on the trail at any given moment … I just don’t like the ground. The earth is not my element.

Water is very powerful, which is really intriguing to me but it’s a little bit overwhelming, you know, I always feel like I can’t breathe in it … (laughing) … well, you can’t! It’s water, you can’t breathe in water. … but when I’m in the air, I can just relax and I’m there.

So do you fly every day?

Right now it is complicated, for many reasons, currently I’m seven months pregnant (she beams).

So you are not flying, or are you?

At the moment I am not flying, I stopped when I got married two months ago.

Congratulations! Did you get married in the air? (laughs out loud) No, no, not in the air, we got married on water, actually.

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“It is, because when I’m in the air, I feel that I can relax and I feel safe, and yes, I feel comfortable and at home!

For me, air is the most empowering element in the world.”

OPEN LINK ellen-brennan.com OPEN NOTE Carl Boenish was an American cinematographer, considered to be the father of BASE jumping. In 1978 he created the acronym B.A.S.E., it stands for Building, Antenna, Span (e.g. Bridge), Earth.

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Light and airy.

New QS40 Air 60% less plastic, 100% more air!

After we dissolved part of its casing into thin air, this pen sits light as a feather in its user’s hand. With this in mind, we gave it the name "Air". It takes up to 60% less plastic to produce these models than other, comparable instruments. And, when you consider that 30% of this plastic is recycled from our own waste materials, these models are truly a breath of fresh air.

Available in matt and soft touch with three clip designs – two made from plastic, with elegant contours or sleek, straight edges, and one metal version with different finishes.

The exposed refill is available in white or black as standard and in metal as an added extra. Print surface on the clip.

Also available with metal button in different satin or chrome finishes. Clip holders provide individual colour accents.

Features high-quality Floating Ball® 1.0 Lead Free refill as standard with lead-free tip and low-pollutant ink. Like all Prodir writing instruments, the new QS40 Air is also refillable.

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New QS40 Air

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OPEN LINK prodir.com/air OPEN SAMPLE Get your free sample on reply.prodir.com

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Philipp Kristian Diekhöner on digitalized trust.

Bytes you can build on

Text: Eckhard Sohns Photos: Philipp Kristian Diekhöner

What does trust mean in a digital economy where we no longer shake hands but instead leave anonymous comments?

More than you might think. A conversation with Philipp Kristian Diekhöner, author of the book The Trust Economy.

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OPEN: You talk about trust experiencing a renaissance in the economy.

What exactly is changing?

PHILIPP KRISTIAN DIEKHÖNER: In the last 20 years, the possibilities offered by technology have developed so rapidly that many people have assumed we are experiencing some sort of hyper-industrialization in which anonymity will increase. In actual fact, however, we are using digital media to integrate relationships more prominently in business life once again. The interesting thing about the platform economy is that trust can be accrued relatively easily around the world with very different individuals.

What does that mean in practical terms?

All good business models function as intermediaries for trust. What we’re currently experiencing is, to put it simply, a process in which we are shifting our trust in offline intermediaries to online intermediaries. In doing so, we are digitalizing our trust. This also means that digital technology affords us the ability to scale trust processes much more effectively. That might all sound rather abstract just now, but the exciting thing is that it is bringing about a transformation in how we create value. Take platforms like Uber or eBay, for example: they act as brokers between two parties – driver and passenger, seller and buyer – and create trust through reciprocal rating systems. Trust is the central driver of value creation.

Aren’t we often somewhat too trusting?

Technology can also mislead us and cause us to place our trust in strangers or new ideas. E-commerce is a classic example of this. Going back 30 years, very few people would have imagined shopping in a store that doesn’t actually exist. Today, almost everyone does it.

The same also applies to dating. The exciting thing about this is that bridges of trust are often built on advance payments. To give an example: There’s an investment app that is marketed very nicely in Singapore, where I live. As it turns out, the guys behind it have absolutely no idea about how to build a portfolio or the things they’re investing in.

We trust digital user interfaces and don’t think twice about whether the people behind them are putting a prod-

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OPEN TRUST

uct on the market that people can actually trust. This is an extremely important topic.

Sounds risky.

Right. You probably belong to the Baby Boomer generation – that means that your default is to mistrust everyone and everything, and you probably think that trust is something that has to be earned.

Not quite, but almost.

Generations Y and Z, which I’m a part of, offer an advance of trust until they learn better. This chiefly comes down to the fact that technological platforms have brought truly exciting new dimensions to our lives. As a result, my generation is convinced that technology and user interfaces are reliable, at least most of the time. We assume that, in general, we can trust other people from the outset – a very romantic notion. And this happens even though we all live in the same offline world in which mistrust is institutionalized: from passport control to background checks when you apply for a new job, in the offline world, mistrust is always the default. Contracts take an eternity to conclude because mistrust is regarded as justified. We should seriously consider how we want to organize ourselves in the future to restore a framework to our offline society that would enable us to trust one another again without all this bureaucracy.

Companies build brands to earn trust and convert this into positive purchasing decisions. What would change for brands in your model?

Previously, companies had total control and could define a brand completely – that’s no longer the case. Today, brands are dynamic and are defined by their users, who share their opinions and views online with others. The crucial difference between the previous situation and now is, therefore, that the social capital on which brands are based has become quantifiable. There’s data that shows who I interact with, the nature of this relationship, how we conduct transactions and maintain personal relationships. What hasn’t changed is the fact that brands can only gain and maintain a market advantage when people believe and trust in their uniqueness. A brand’s social capital, its personality,

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and its stand-out factor are ultimately what make it successful over the years.

What role does trust play in corporate culture?

An intriguing question. All research to date has shown that trust is the most important characteristic of positive, successful corporate cultures. They magnetize people so they can reach a common goal. In most companies, however,

ing change forward as fast as we should.

When we bring this back to the topic of culture, it means that the culture must change so that a company can be changed.

But then why should the culture of a company change if its employees don’t trust that the new culture will, ultimately, be better? This is the topic that interests me: How can I magnetize a company? How can I ensure that every employee will believe and be convinced that the change

“All research to date has shown that trust is the most important characteristic of positive, successful corporate cultures.

They magnetize people so they can reach a common goal.” including most small and medium-sized enterprises, there is no such magnetization. Why not? We’ve made exceptional technological progress in recent years.

Yet, many companies continue to act as though nothing has changed. My core thesis is that too many rules and too little trust leads to technology being used ineffectively and prevents us from push-

they can bring about together will be worthwhile? We’re currently building a tool that will allow us to quantify and visualize trust dynamics in companies. The vision behind this product idea is for us to help companies to work together more effectively through a healthy dose of trust.

Mr. Diekhöner, thank you for your time.

OPEN PEOPLE Philipp Kristian Diekhöner is Managing Partner of the strategic consultancy Denkfabrik Digital. He has been recognized as a St. Gallen Symposium Leader of Tomorrow, a World Economic Forum Global Shaper, and is a Fellow of the Kairos Society.

OPEN READ Philipp Kristian Diekhöner’s book, The Trust Economy,

is available in English, Chinese and German.

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OPEN TRUST

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From Tierra del Fuego to Greenland and from Chile to Australia, they are ubiquitous: TV presenters, taxi drivers, Nobel Prize Laureates,

#myp The Prodir Magazine

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dog groomers and heads of state all write with Prodir instruments. We wanted to document this, once and for all. Get involved.

prodir OPEN LINK instagram.com/prodir_official

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OPEN #

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No land has even been as elaborately riddled with holes by human-hand as Switzerland has.

The Emmental Syndrome The Prodir Magazine

OPEN HOLES

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Even Sisyphus, during the course of evolution, must surely have asked himself whether there wasn't an alternative to his incredibly straining routine. Because anyone who has only ever been surrounded by mountains surely sometimes dreams about flat stretches of land, and at some point, would like to take a shortcut through the hard rock face. The Swiss will have had a similar experience.

Text: Stefano Bernasconi Photos: Eugenio Castiglioni

In the beginning there was a drill to aid with the breakthrough. Here, too, a Swiss citizen played a significant role: the spiral drill, which you yourself use to drill your dowel holes, was invented by Giovanni Martignoni from Ticino in the 1860s. Decades later, with a 400 m long and 2'700 t heavy giant drill, the Swiss dug and built the world's longest railway tunnel. If you add to the 57 kilometres of the Gotthard Base Tunnel all the car and rail tunnels over two kilometres in length, the total span is 600 Swiss tunnel kilometres. And if you add those that are shorter, at equals a distance that would extend from Sicily to Denmark: Europe underground. Swisstunnel, the Swiss database for tunnels, currently lists 1'329 tunnel projects - and almost every month others are added to the list.

However, the hole, in its most functional form, the tunnel, is not only a question of arriving somewhere faster. Good cheese, too - something for which the Swiss are also well known - needs the natural coolness of the mountains’ depths. This is how around 6'500 cheese wheels from the Emmental-based Gourmino AOP ripen in perfect coolness and humidity in a 200 m long tunnel system deep in the Blüemlisalp massif. Where else?! After all, in addition to the holes in the cheese, the hole in the mountain is decisive for its quality. Whereby the holes in the cheese simply require hay particles in the milk: the more hay, the more holes in the cheese. But here too, apart from experience, moderation is essential: Too many holes would mean too little cheese; but too few would also mean it’s not Emmentaler. Some actually fear a similar scenario for Switzerland: So many tunnels might actually mean less Switzerland.

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OPEN HOLES

However, the Swiss didn’t just dig down deep for the sake of shorter distances and piquancy, but also for external security.

During the years when the world believed it was time to prepare for the worst, they began to excavate a large number of bunkers in our rocky foundation. During the Cold War, everyone should at least have their own bunker. While students in American schools learned to hide under a desk and hold a math book over their heads in the event of a nuclear attack, we built a network of more than 5'000 public and 300'000 private bunkers to accommodate more than eight million people. And as we noticed after Gorbachev and the fall of the Wall that this was perhaps a little exaggerated, these underground shelters today often serve as storerooms or rehearsal rooms for punk bands and the like.

And if you want to get a taste of this most Swiss of all worlds, you should book one of the 17 rooms with shared bathroom in probably the most amazing accommodation in Switzerland. Hotel La Claustra at the Gotthard Pass was built deep into the underground fortress of an old bunker.

Here you’ll find lots of rock, lots of water but very little light, of course no cell phone reception and no TV, but in return, peace and quiet to reflect on how to finally get to where you always wanted to go by the shortest route.

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OPEN LINK claustra.ch swisstunnel.ch

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You are both one and many; you are a universe.

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DESIGN YOUR PEN.

Your imagination, your mind, and your emotions are too diverse for you to stay the same day in, day out. Make something of them.

OPEN LINK dna.prodir.store

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Decision minimalism

Iʼll do it tomorrow Text: Stefano Bernasconi

If we really want less, in order to have more of everything, Marie Kondoʼs declutter activities and a tiny house will hardly do the trick. The only thing that just might provide help is a radical yet wonderfully comforting decision diet: making fewer decisions to live a better life.

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A decision is the most underestimated risk factor in our life. More precisely: plural, decisions. After all, the ability to decide about something is a very limited resource.

And in order to make frugal use of it, people who have to decide on many and important things consciously reduce the number of decisions they must make in their lives. For example, about clothing.

Which explains why Mark Zuckerberg always runs around in the same grey t-shirt and Steve Jobs always wore the same turtleneck jumper. When he was in office, former US President Barack Obama deliberately reduced his wardrobe. As he told Vanity Fair: “I try to minimise the amount of decisions I have to make. I don’t want to have to decide what I eat or wear, because I have to make so many other decisions.“ These people clear out the decisions that are unimportant in order to make room for what really counts. That’s the spatial dimension – “the Marie Kondo dimension” of the decision diet. The other is time. It must be kept in mind at all times.

And last-not-least, there’s the physical aspect of the decision: Even the wisest person, according to psychologist Roxy Baumeister, should make no decisions if they haven’t had a good night’s sleep or if their blood sugar’s low. “The best decision-makers,” Baumeister writes, “are those who know when they can’t trust themselves.” With eight billion people, each with thousands of things to decide every day, we need more of these “best decision-makers”. Decision Fatigue has global consequences. We should therefore learn to decide accordingly - and to put off everything that’s important until tomorrow after breakfast: Mañana, mañana - in order to finally get rid of our parents' there’s no time like the present-mentality.

Every salesperson knows that it’s easier to get me to buy a bigger house, a superfluous t-shirt or shoes that are too big and which I will never wear, in the afternoon. For just as there is a World Exhaustion Day, on which we have used up all the resources available for that one year, each of us has his or her own individual Decision Overshoot Hour, on which their decision battery is empty. But we keep on going anyway. A responsible-minded CEO will no longer decide on a range of comprehensive restructuring measures after 4:00 p.m. And all of us should rather postpone divorces, resignations and marriage proposals until the next morning.

Maybe it’s a good idea if we do the same with political elections: The world just might look different today if there were some sort of UN mandate for early votes better!

OPEN READ Do you suffer from Decision Fatigue? New York Times Magazine, August 23, 2011.

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Ernesto Oroza's Rikimbilis

Where there’s a will, there’s a way

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As the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, it seemed as though everyone in Moscow had forgotten their old friends far away in the Caribbean. They were abandoned to their own devices. Deliveries of crucial goods stopped overnight. Cuba lost 80 percent of its imports: from oil to medication, spare parts to food, everything was in short supply. The country’s economy shrunk by 34 percent. And, because such downturns usually only occur in wartime, Castro’s bureaucrats showed almost self-deprecating wit by describing the situation as The Special Period in Time of Peace.

Text: Max Schneider Photos: Ernesto Oroza

However, the bureaucrats were not the only ones to demonstrate ingenuity in handling the economic crisis. With next to nothing being imported into the country, the US trade embargo still in place – and actually becoming even stricter in 1992 – Cubans were forced to work with what they had. If something broke, they patched it up; if something stopped working, they repaired it; if they just couldn’t get hold of something, they’d have to make do with something else.

The Cuban people learned to look past an object’s original purpose and its life cycle.

They would scour the city in search of everything they could use, any which way, for anything. They illegaly transformed bicycles into makeshift motorbikes known as rikimbilis, often driven by an old water-pump motor with a plastic bottle as the gas tank. And, because rikimbilis produced a deafening noise, their riders constantly had to seek out different routes in order to evade the transport police.

And if they had a dream – owning a motorcycle, say – they would have to build it themselves. Somehow.

Oroza, who has collected and studied these objects for decades, has given this phenomenon a name: technological disobedience.

During this time, Ernesto Oroza was a student at the Cuban Superior Design Institute in Havana. He used his camera to record how a generation of amateur engineers, inventors, and welders created functional objects and machines from scrap and trash.

Back then, Cubans would seal the bottom of cars to convert them into boats, large boxes were welded onto trucks to become buses, and five old cars from the scrapheap could be used to make one functional vehicle – the front end resembling a Peugeot while the rear looked like the visionary project of a Chinese manufacturer from 20 years later.

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WORKER, BUILD YOUR OWN MACHINERY! CHE GUEVARA The Prodir Magazine

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OPEN PEOPLE Ernesto Oroza, born in 1968 in Havana, lives and works in Aventura, Florida. His works have been exhibited at, among others, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Museo Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City, and the Institut de Cultura La Virreina in Barcelona.

OPEN LINK ernestooroza.com architectureofnecessity.com technologicaldisobedience.net

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Weighty and made from minerals.

New QS Stone 60% less plastic, 50% heavier We manufacture the QS models of the Stone series from a new plastic which has been enhanced with minerals.

In this way, we substantially reduce the amount of plastic, make them heavier and endow the pens with an even stronger quality appearance.

Available for the QS01, QS20 and QS30 designs in matt varnished casing colours such as Graphite, Silver, Copper, Gold, Red Quartzite, Blue Cobalt and White Dolomite.

Metal clips with colour contrasted clip-holder, transparent and polished. Features high-quality Floating Ball® 1.0 Lead Free refill as standard with lead free tip and low-pollutant ink. Like all Prodir writing instruments, the new QS Stone is also refillable.

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New QS Stone

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OPEN LINK prodir.com/stone OPEN SAMPLE Get your free sample on reply.prodir.com

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Rock balancing

The Stone Placer

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Text: Carla Emmenegger Photos: Michael Grab

Michael Grab places stones on top of one another: over a period of hours, even days, for the most part unaided, sometimes as a performance in front of an audience. With infinite patience, he brings them into a stable balance solely by means of gravity: heavy and light, round and craggy, small and large, during snow and rain, anywhere where he finds them, by a river near his home, in the dessert, on a beach or in pedestrian areas. For smaller sculptures, he only needs 30 minutes; for larger ones, hours or even days. “Balancing stones”, says Grab, “is meditation. When I feel the gravity, when I have the feeling, as if each and every part freezes all at once and merges into one big whole, I am completely calm and focussed”. Sometimes, his efforts are in vain, a gust of wind or a second of inattentiveness can bring it all down.

But he then simply starts all over again. As a matter of fact, he loves to destroy his sculptures as much as he loves to build them, the artist says. To again bring the works out of balance, so that everything looks as if it had never been there in the first place. To depart from the site without leaving behind any traces is how he prefers it to be. With the exception of the photos, which endure.

OPEN LINK gravityglue.com

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The calendar that hung on the door was from 1958.

Luxury is dispensing with everything that is superfluous Text: Stefano Bernasconi Photos: Buchner Bründler Architekten, Ruedi Walter

Upon entering the village, the first thing that stands out are the terraced fields: 25 km of drystone walls made of rocks layered neatly on top of each other, making it possible to plant the steep, inaccessible mountain slopes with vegetables and wheat. An elaborate feat accomplished by human hand, located in Linescio, a small village in the remote Rovana Valley. Here, in southern Ticino, where people have always built with stones and were forced to make the best of the little that is there, is where Daniel Buchner, from the Basel-based architectural firm Buchner Bründler, together with his domestic partner Lilitt Bollinger, built a summer hideaway, whose impressive luxury stems from its radical simplicity.

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Linescio –Ticino 46°18′29″N 8°35′02″E

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OPEN: Daniel Buchner, tell me how you came across such a house!

In the spring of 2008, I had to travel to Ticino a few times for a project. One evening, I noticed by chance the posting of the house, and spontaneously arranged an appointment for the next morning. When I arrived in Linescio, the weather was still a bit wintry, and the countryside was peaceful and austere. Only the distant rushing of the Rovana River broke the silence - I was instantly enchanted by this place.

In what condition was the house back then?

The 200-year-old stone walls were still in good shape. In contrast to the interior of the house, which had only one habitable room. There was no running water and no electricity. There was a big hole in the roof, the beams were rotten.

And the calendar that hung on the door was from 1958 - nobody had lived here since that time.

Apparently, this didn’t scare you away.

I completely fell for its charm. I actually wasn’t looking for a holiday home, but I couldn't get this fairy-tale house out of my head. We purchased it without even knowing what exactly we wanted to do with it. First, we cleared it out - tools, shovels, saws, copper kettles and dishes.

And slowly but surely, the unfamiliar house turned into our house. Over time, it became increasingly clear to us that we wanted to fulfil our desire for a contemporary home with respect for the house’s history.

were very pleased that the house was once again to be inhabited. They invited us to eat with them and offered us a place to sleep when we couldn’t sleep at our house due to the rebuilding. Despite the location far from the road, the construction work went surprisingly well.

We carried most of the materials on foot up to the house and organised a helicopter only for the heavier objects.

Does any particular moment during the renovation really stand out in your mind?

The happiest moment was probably when we were finished with the work and realised that the house still had the same expressiveness as when we discovered it.

How does it feel now when you spend your holiday within the old walls?

Very relaxing! Weather permitting, we travel regularly to Linescio between March and November. The original simplicity and the materialisation can still be felt: We have a hearth, a small place to cook and running water - all of which are very simply designed. The stillness and tranquillity of the area and the house, which initially captivated me, were able to be preserved. When we’re here, everyday life is far, far away.

Thank you for the talk, Mr. Buchner.

What do you mean by that?

The house opened our eyes to the fate of this region. At the end of the 19th century, a number of famines forced almost every third man to leave the valley.

Those who stayed, mostly women and children, lived a meagre, hard life. We wanted to preserve this minimalism and decided against, for example, heat insulation, as this would have changed the aura of the house.

How long did it take to complete the renovation?

Around three years. We worked together with local builders and craftspeople and did quite a bit on our own. It was an amazing experience: our neighbours

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“The happiest moment was perhaps when we were finished with the work and realised that the house still had the same expressiveness as when we discovered it.”

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OPEN LINK bbarc.ch OPEN NOTE Daniel Buchner, born 1967 in Berneck, founded in 1997, together with Andreas Bründler, the architectural firm Buchner Bründler in Basel.

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For the Amazon, take the next left

Into the New Wild

Text: Claudio Visentin Photos: Natalino Russo, Valentina Scaglia

At the end of the 19th century, an atlas spread open on a child’s lap under their school desk burgeoned with adventure and discovery. A host of areas at the heart of Africa had not yet been fully explored and the search was on for the legendary source of the Nile. The tangles of the Amazon rainforest shrouded the temples of lost civilizations and species believed to have become extinct. The polar regions lay in wait for heroic explorers to raise their nations’ flags.

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The 20th century has erased the final specks of mystery from our maps. Every conceivable location has been discovered, visited, and described. Satellites observe the earth from orbit without interruption and nothing escapes the gaze of Google Maps. Tourism seems to be little more than tiresome repetitions of identical experiences.

Some time ago, however, a quiet revolution took place, transforming our existence on this planet. For the first time in millennia of human history, the number of people living in cities overtook the number living in rural areas. Two hundred thousand people, predominantly young people, move to

parks and conservation reserves – that is to say, areas in which nature is left to its own devices and to which humans have no access (a good example being Valsolda on the eastern arm of Lake Lugano). Nature uses every space in our urban society, no matter how small, to put down roots. Even a temporary interruption in access to an area (due to, say, a landslide) is enough to isolate an area. This makes it possible, even just a few miles from major cities, to encounter a wolf, ramble through cloud-shrouded forests, or shelter in the church of a long-abandoned village. The disappearance of disused roads and paths does the rest. After a few years, only a handful of increasingly

Nature uses every space in our urban society, no matter how small, to put down roots. Even a temporary interruption in access to an area is enough to isolate an area. This makes it possible, even just a few miles from major cities, to encounter a wolf, ramble through cloud-shrouded forests, or shelter in the church of a long-abandoned village. cities every day. By 2050, two-thirds of the global population (more than six billion people) will live in hyper-connected, intelligent, and sustainable global cities. Longtime residents of mountains and forests – farmers, shepherds, rangers, and charcoal burners – are leaving the countryside to become urban citizens. Centuries-old lifestyles are becoming stories that are no longer told.

And so, almost unnoticed, the wilderness is regaining the upper hand in these areas: In Italy, an area of six thousand square meters has become wild once again in the space of ten years. This figure goes beyond nature

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faint traces act as reminders of humans’ former presence there: disused railway lines, bridges, pits, abandoned villages, hybridized fruit trees, agricultural terraces overgrown with dense, young vegetation, crumbling dry-stone walls... Forests begin to spread out across once-farmed pastures and fields. Wild animals proliferate freely and frolic between the ruins.

You don’t need to travel far to take a wilderness trip. Situated in the Italian region of Piedmont, between the Province of Verbano and Switzerland and just a few miles outside of Milan, Val Grande National Park is the largest uninhabited area in Europe.

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The ancient network of Alpine pastures and paths has become wild again; nature is reasserting its might following centuries of arduous efforts to subdue it. Val di Vesta, located in the mountain fold between Lakes Garda and Idro, has been isolated and uninhabited since the middle of the 20th century after the erection of a dam to create the artificial Valvestino Lake. What’s more, the Italian portion of the Onsernone Valley is now only connected to the rest of the country by high mountain passes that are covered in snow and impassable in winter.

The English word wilderness has now been adopted in Italian, as the language otherwise lacked an adequate equivalent. Wilderness is an utterly apt term here: it both denotes a space and evokes a sense of the untamed. In truth, among the masses of people living anonymous lives in modern cities, there remain some people fully aware of their wild ancestry. Between the artificial light and the cacophony of sounds, a gust of wind from the mountains carrying the scent of the forest on its back is all it takes to revive the wildness lying dormant within them. One such person was Henry David Thoreau, a non-conformist American philosopher who, in 1845, withdrew to a hut he had built on the banks of the

Walden Pond. He spent two years there searching for an intimate connection to nature and in the hope of finding himself. Another example is Gary Snyder, who wrote: “As a poet, I hold the most archaic values on earth. They go back to the upper Paleolithic: the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe”.

A journey into the wilderness frees us from the many shackles of our society. It awakes within us an ability to feel, to care for ourselves, to be alone, and to take our destiny into our own hands.

OPEN READ Valentina Scaglia, Wilderness in Italia. A piedi nei luoghi del silenzio, published in Italian by Hoepli, Milan.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods, 1854.

Gary Snyder, Myths & Texts, 1978.

OPEN NOTE Claudio Visentin teaches the History of Tourism at the Università della Svizzera Italiana, Lugano.

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Prodir people

You’ve almost certainly held his creations in your hand – many times over, in fact.

Donato Marotta is the king of ballpoint pen tips. For over 40 years, he and his team have created small but perfectly formed components that make all the difference. Though only 6 to 14 mm long with balls from 0.3 to 1.6 mm in diameter, they guarantee optimal writing quality.

In his career, Donato has produced countless billions of these ultra-precise masterpieces that are used around the world – including in Prodir writing instruments.

NAME Donato Marotta POSITION

Production Manager, BU Premec Components

PERIOD OF SERVICE Worked at Premec for 43 years before retiring in July 2019

OPEN LINK premec.ch

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When the film doesn’t end at the cinema

Ringos Bett Text: Herbert Genzmer

It’s the late 1990s and I am spending some days in Manhattan, staying in a cheap hotel on the Bowery in Chinatown. On the evening of the third day I watch a horror movie in one of those typical New York movie houses without fixed times for shows, where you come and go as you please: Basket Case of 1982. There are horror movies that take my breath away haunting me for years!

Basket Case is a cult movie, delirious and hyped-up: In a wicker basket that Duane Bradley carries with him wherever he goes, languishes his twin brother Belial. They were Siamese twins, separated against their will at an early age. Deformed Belial has nothing more than a head and two arms with claw-like hands. The twins seek revenge for their messed-up lives. Duane keeps throwing hamburgers into the basket and chomping sounds emerge. Naturally, we don’t know what’s in the basket until the end of the film. What completely takes me aback, is the hotel in the movie: It is the one where I was staying! There are the exact same tiny rooms with TV-sets hung up high under the ceiling, the same ugly wall-to-wall carpets and wall paper. I watch the crazed slasher schlep the basket through the exact same shabby maze of hallways I walk through to get to the lift, which has doors that take an eternity to close and get moving. Everything in the movie happens by coincidence.

Chains of accidental events accompany every victim all the way to their blood-soaked deaths.

It’s totally out of the question to go back to that hotel now.

Back in those years, the Bowery was a street that you rushed through, hands deep in your pockets, collar turned-up, head down, unfocused gaze. A slight drizzle in the air. Colored light reflects on shiny asphalt. But long stretches of the street are darker than the darkest night. It crosses my mind that only Berlin is darker, but without the horror, without the slasher from the movie. There are no shadows looming as vague hunched figures in corners or in the darkness of doorways. Scared stiff, I finally reach lights, people, at a corner Broome Street Bar and I gulp down two beers. At the bar some Germans. What a coincidence, I say. I join them and

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can’t hold it in any longer … I just saw the most shocking horror movie and, like, I just have to talk to somebody, the need kills me! They are throwing odd glances at each other but let me join in. Four friends, in New York for five days. I talk my head off, I can’t stop and don’t let anybody get a word in, buy them a round. Where they are from, I want to know, Me, says one and looks at me, I’m from Berlin. What a coincidence, I went to school there. Where do you live?

Kreuzberg. I can’t believe it, exactly where I lived. Where exactly? Wrangelstraße! Me too, number seven. That’s exactly where I live! Why is this guy giving me that furtive look? And he stays totally cool, nothing seems to surprise him. I lived on the third floor, I continue … left or right, he shoots. Right! He shakes his head: Are you kidding me! The others are all ears now, as he carries on: I have the large room in front, towards the street, somebody built an elevated floor into this room and covered it all with dark green wall-to-wall carpeting and the bed, the bed they sunk into the ground … Ringo’s bed, one of the guys interrupts him and laughs. From the movie Help!, says another one. You’re shitting me! Do you know who I … that was me, I was the one who built it! Me. It’s a small world, he grins. Is that evil in his eye? Is that a basket next to him on the floor? I throw money on the bar with trembling hands and flee.

OPEN NOTE Herbert Genzmer is an author, translator, and teacher who works in Taragona, Berlin und Krefeld. The Neue Zürcher Zeitung once called him the most American of all German writers.

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One-to-one

Here, Giuseppe Castiglioni, aged 7, always draws a picture inspired by a writing instrument that he particularly likes.

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The Prodir Magazine Issue 09, 2020 open.prodir.com open@prodir.ch © 2020 Pagani Pens SA Pagani Pens SA - Prodir Via Serta 22 CH 6814 Lamone www.prodir.com Concept comunicAzione Studio CCRZ, Balerna Art Direction Studio CCRZ Copy Herbert Genzmer Eckhard Sohns Stefano Bernasconi Max Schneider Carla Emmenegger Claudio Visentin Marketing Prodir Translations Baker & Harrison, München Photos Damien Deschamps [p.4/9] Ian Webb [p.6] Frødis Ormåsen [p.9] Philipp Kristian Diekhöner [p.14–16] Eugenio Castiglioni [p.20–22] Ernesto Oroza [p.28–33] Michael Grab [p.38–39] Buchner Bründler Architekten [p.41] Ruedi Walter [p.44–45] Valentina Scaglia [p.47/51] Natalino Russo [p.48–49] CCRZ [p.53] CGI and Still-life Studio 9010 Typeface Avenir SangBleu Republic Paper FSC® Texa cedro mosaico Holmen TRND Print Nava, Milano

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