A House is not a Home: Ettore Sottsass and Arnaldo Pomodoro

Abstract

The conference was part of the study days "Spaces of Living and Places of Collectivity", organized on September 25–26–27, 2025, by the Department of the Arts at the University of Bologna. "A House is not a Home" (Saturday, September 27, 2025), took place within the session "Exhibiting the Habitat / Displaying Dwelling", curated by Anna Rosellini (supervisor of my doctoral dissertation) and Stefano Setti. "A House is not a Home" was not conceived as a traditional architectural history lecture. Its narrative adopted a paradoxical tone—just like its title, which inverts the famous "A Home is not a House" by Reyner Banham and François Dallegret. The conference began in the present, then moved back to the past, and finally pointed toward an uncertain future. At its core lay a little-known episode involving two major figures: Arnaldo Pomodoro, who in 1965 commissioned his friend Ettore Sottsass Jr.—at a moment of financial fragility—to design a “house–non-house” in Milan