Playbook for Hospitality

Morning Table by Piero Bisello

(Steps – vegetable garden – lots of people waiting for the bus, not enough seat)

Homage to No Lord

At the last meeting of the city council, after hazy discussions on urban farming, the mayor was clear: “monumental, monumental, monumental,” he yelled, evoking the famous Steve Ballmer tech motivational scream “developers, developers, developers” from the late 90s. No one in the city’s institutions wanted to be subtle anymore yet the usual issues were still there. The ambition to go large seemed to do the trick. As the debate progressed, each politician formed their opinion on what “monumental” really meant. “What exactly should be monumental?” someone inquired with bravery. Puzzled faces were rarely seen in the self-assuring circles of the city council; they multiplied now. Not used to giving slide shows, the mayor surprisingly opened his laptop, starting what looked like a student presentation miraculously with no hiccups. After a few watermarked stock images of the usual suspects in matters of monumentality–Egyptian pyramids and regime buildings from Eastern Europe were shown–the mayor reassured almost all of his peers by saying that propaganda was not what he had in mind. Instead, he spent considerable time on the monument to Sandro Pertini in Milan, designed by Aldo Rossi in the 80s. A description reads: it is a hollow cube, 8 meters each side, with one of them punctuated by a triangular fountain and a slit-like opening, which can be reached from the inside via a staircase that also acts as seats for a theater. His presentation concluded: the iconic Rossi design should be copied for really minor bus stops in town. Who would have guessed? Everyone was euphoric.