La Cupola

Image on the cover by Diana Lanciotti INTERVIEW IN ENGLISH (Entrevista en español más abajo) ARQUITECTURA-G: You come from a family of entrepreneurs and winemakers, and you contributed successfully to the winemaking industry with your packaging designs before you graduated from college. That was before your passion for domes drove you in another direction. You’ve mentioned the Pantheon and Santa Maria del Fiore several times as a reference, and we’ve read that even your thesis work during your architecture studies was about domes. How and when did you become interested in domes? Dante Bini: Well, it was not only the influence of classic architecture. Back in the ‘60s, it was very fashionable to work with ancient structures like domes or tensile structures— in general, efficient structures that use little material. Traditional domes are built using very complicated formwork underneath, with an enormous carpentry effort and very complex scheduling. I realised that the cost of the formwork, a structure that disappears after the dome is completed, was sometimes higher than the cost of the dome itself. I started wondering how I could solve this problem and studied the work of Eduardo Torroja, Félix Candela, and other architects and engineers. Besides the cost issue, I also decided to focus on the problem of scheduling. Building domes used to take lots of time. In 1961 I was finally granted my degree in architecture, and I decided to start working on my own. It wasn’t that easy to find clients, so I started a construction company with a friend of mine. I wanted to be an architect of my time, and I was thinking about thin-shell domes and vaults. One day, something extraordinary happened. I was playing tennis at a club in Bologna. It was winter and the weather was bad, and a large green-and-white balloon, inflated at low pressure, was set up to cover the playing courts. It was an inflatable roof.