Albert Jacquard and the Academy of Architecture

Albert Jacquard and the Academy of Architecture
On the centenary of his birth

"The architect is the prototype of everything that works in ways contrary to nature. Instead of ensuring that today is simply the result of yesterday, he ensures that today is the result of what he designs for tomorrow"

Albert Jacquard (1925-2013) was one of the most radical and necessary intellectual figures of twentieth-century Europe. A geneticist, humanist, and ethical thinker, Jacquard engaged with the major issues of modernity — scientific responsibility, social justice, the relationship between knowledge and power, and human dignity — with rare clarity and a profound moral tension.

In the early years of the Accademia di Architettura of Mendrisio, Mario Botta strongly wished for Jacquard’s presence, recognizing in his work and thought an essential reference not only for scientific culture, but for a humanistic education capable of questioning architectural design in its broadest and most responsible dimension. His participation in the Accademia was neither episodic nor symbolic: it was a clear signal of the cultural direction the school intended to pursue from its very foundation.

Jacquard brought to Mendrisio a vision in which knowledge is never neutral, and in which every form of expertise — including architectural knowledge — must confront the consequences of its actions on the world and on others. His thinking, far removed from determinism and from any reduction to pure technique, insisted on the centrality of relationships, on cooperation as a foundation of human evolution, and on the need to resist logics of exclusion, blind competition, and domination.

In this sense, his presence at the Accademia helped to reinforce the idea of the architect as a responsible figure, called not only to solve formal or technical problems, but to take a position on the major issues of his or her time: the environment, society, inequality, and the future of human communities. Jacquard reminded us that intelligence, when separated from ethics, can become destructive, and that culture, when not shared, loses its deepest meaning.

One hundred years after his birth, remembering Albert Jacquard at the Accademia di Architettura of Mendrisio means reaffirming a foundational choice: that of a school which does not separate design from thought, technique from responsibility, or education from civic engagement. His passage through Mendrisio remains a living trace, a constant reminder of an architecture that does not merely construct objects, but consciously participates in the construction of our shared world.