Bruce Sterling proposes to speak as science fiction writer with architectural problems. He discusses three very different domestic spaces he has worked on in Turin with Jasmina Tesanovic:
•The Casa Jasmina in the Garrone Foundry (Giovanni Antonio Porcheddu, 1919), which was abandoned in the 1970s, and has been brought to life by FabLab Torino, Arduino and others. The Casa provides a demonstration home and family that designers can design for. Sterling notes that it has sparked critical-feminist debate about the implications of the Internet of Things.
•The apartment in Turin that Jasmina Tesanovic and he have customized in a DIY style.
•The 1653 palace of Cristina di Borbone-Francia, Aunt of Louis XIV, palace, decorated by Filippo San Martino di Agliè, whic Tesanovic and Sterling currently use as an office while they both write novels. The space was offered to them while Sterling was working on a novel about Di Agliè, which he describes as like getting a phone call from a character from one of his books. In contrast to the DIY apartment, the villa is full of antique furniture, frescoes, bizarre echoing chambers, and a private lake with an island featuring fake Roman ruins. While this “oddly friendless, almost haunted, aristocratic utopia” is the opposite of the bustling communal Foundry, they are both characteristically Turinese.
Sterling concludes by stressing the significance of architecture in his work, the built environment, Turin, the structure of cities, the intentions of things, and the flow of time. “My experience has changed my idea of what I thought I was doing.”
