Philosophy has always paid little attention to the home and more to the city… Why?

The problem is not only of the philosophers: even the architects have treated the house badly. Rem Koolhaas, Aldo Rossi… there are many books on the city written by architects who are obviously part of a common cultural background. There is almost nothing on the house . The investment of thought concerned the city more because starting from the Renaissance, work was snatched from the home and transferred there. The urban dimension becomes the place of production, of thought, of confrontation, mostly male. The city space is invested with an ideal of equality and collective evolution.

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What is the role of design in building the happiness that can come from domesticity?

You move and you realize that home is the little world you need to have close by, but you move to live better. And it is that "best" that makes the house a moral reality. Everyone puts what he wants into that project. The fact that the best corresponds to a house tells us that design is a science of happiness , it is the knowledge of that best, the divination technique that allows us to be happier. In the golden years of Italian design this was very clear. There was a dimension of playful discovery , less functional and more devoted to the invention of a way of life, of a possible new happiness. The point is that the project does not last long, it must be reinvented all the time. We are not naturally happy in the world. We have to cook reality and in the kitchen the flavor is indeducible with respect to the starting ingredients. Design is a melee with the unknown emerging to make your life unforgettable .

So what should design do to guide us towards this continuous reinvention?

The misunderstanding of contemporary design is that of wanting to design forms: in the 1960s it was known instead that the designer designs possible lives . So the point now is to understand what we want to do with our relationship with bodies, not with forms. Let's take gender issues for example: there is a lot of excitement, a desire for freedom. However, this is accompanied by a very strong, somewhat contradictory form of normativism. We should understand how to give bodies that kind of attention to things that can only be divine , not predetermined. The idea of ​​the bathroom, even the one dedicated to well-being, comes from prejudice. If, on the other hand, we relate to the body again as diviners, who knows what we might discover. It is useless to design the shape of the bathroom, useless to make pre-established decisions.

In his book he suggests a more conscious and autonomous use of the imagination. Why is it important?

If we don't imagine, we die. The problem is that for a thousand reasons we don't know what we want, we don't know what to want because the world has changed. But it is physiological. Before, getting information was complicated: we had to leave the house, ask others, search books.

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Widespread and immediately accessible knowledge is an immense transformation of the world. The problem is to reorient ourselves in these immense digital archives, which are larger than reality.

The house changed its role during the pandemic. What happened?

The pandemic has accelerated movements that were already underway. We were forced to live without a city and we realized that we had already built digital corridors that brought into the house much of what we did in public places. The house has expanded thanks to digital and is a very important element for a thousand reasons. First of all for the secular movement: it really seems the end of the city and, therefore, of modernity.

It says in the book that we should learn to exchange houses like clothes. In what terms?

The pandemic defines the end of the bourgeois home. The new home is emotional, based on friendship and affinity, rather than genealogical and patrimonial. These new houses are often digital, think of a Whatsapp chat which is already a sort of cohabitation even if not physical. spaces of cohabitation are being born in which a common form of life is invented linked to pleasure (not sex). In this sense, the present world is domestic, not a citizen: we don't need the city to do all this.