In a Wallpaper* summer series, architect Carlo Ratti explores Italy through the ordinary objects that define daily life. Enjoy building on the beach with a classic bucket and spade.
Carlo Ratti on the bucket and spade
No architecture firm in the world can match the volume of construction that goes up along the Italian coast every summer. The tools behind this seasonal boom cost less than an espresso and are wielded by a workforce with no licences whatsoever.
We are talking about the plastic bucket and spade. They are the entry point for new generations into the world of construction. They still hold their own against the digital temptations of tablets and smartphones, introducing children to the logic of space through a cycle of rapid creation and immediate collapse: a kind of creative destruction, as Joseph Schumpeter might have called it, that probably works better on the shoreline than it does in economics.
Today, we are once again on the shoreline, bucket and spade in hand. We have seen them a thousand times this summer, hanging from metal hooks outside virtually every tobacconist along the coast between May and September, swaying like brightly colored fruit. They signal that the coast is about to be transformed into an open-air public-works construction site: fortresses, canals, and ramparts erected by tiny master builders who can indulge their architectural fantasies without having to answer to anyone (a bit like, some might say, the current occupant of the White House).
The true kings of the Italian bucket, however, are not found here but in the industrial North. Companies such as Androni Giocattoli churn out endless quantities of these sets using injection-moulding presses. The design is an anonymous midcentury one that spread across the country at the intersection of the construction boom and the boom in seaside holidays.
The design is brilliant in its simplicity. The bucket is not a container but a geometric mould in negative: wet sand is packed into it, the bucket is turned upside down, and voilà – a tower appears. The trick lies in the slight taper of its walls, which makes it easier to release whatever has been formed inside. The spade, meanwhile, is an extension of the arm, sized to fit a child’s hand. No decorative frills: its form follows entirely from the physics of the sandcastle.
The bucket challenges our obsession with permanence. We live in a society devoted to pouring concrete, locking down data, and designing structures to last forever. This plastic toy puts the human ego face to face with an unappealable critic: the tide. You build a castle for three hours, admire it for five minutes, and the sea erases everything. The true value lies in the joy of making, not in the longevity of the structure. We might call it a seaside mandala: beauty that knows it is ephemeral and is enjoyed on the spot for exactly that reason.
When the season ends, the shops take down the beach toys and the shore goes back to being flat and empty. The toys, however, do not disappear – they merely migrate. When the tan has faded, and the fog has sealed our cities, one day we will reach beneath the back seat of the car and our hand will strike a rounded plastic edge. That cracked and faded bucket, with a few grains of dry sand rattling at the bottom, carries a certain promise: another building summer will soon arrive.
About 'Objectify' – a summer series from Italy by Carlo Ratti
Italy’s design canon has been told many times. The Bialetti moka pot, the Vespa, the Fiat 500, the Arco floor lamp: you know the list, and so does every airport bookshop and first-year design student. This column will discuss, poke, investigate, prod, ridicule and beatify the less glamorous Italian objects. They are the ones you ought to know, so that when you visit Italy, or spot apparitions of it on a friend’s social media, you can smugly point out: ‘Did you know the mosquito coil is a masterpiece of Italian design? The condom? The motorway toll transponder?’ Objects so ordinary that Italians walk past them, or handle them every day, without registering that someone, with a mellifluous surname, designed them.
Carlo Ratti
Proust wrote a seven-volume novel because a small cake dipped in tea, the madeleine, unlocked an involuntary flood of memory. For followers of the Italian version of this column, published weekly in Il Sole 24 Ore, the nation’s favourite Sunday read, perhaps these objects will have a similar effect. For you, anglophone readers peering at this somewhere between Rummidge and Euforia, they offer something else: beach conversation topics, an eye trained on unexpected places, and perhaps a few new madeleines for when you visit the peninsula yourself. After all, objects are never just objects. As the great Milanese designer Achille Castiglioni of Arco-floor-lamp fame once declared: ‘objects should keep us company’. Especially during this scorching summer.