"The house at Riva San Vitale, on a sloping site facing Lake Lugano and distant snow-capped mountains, is entered at the upper level via a long steel bridge painted red. The house itself consists of a cubic tower frame with heavy corner pillars built of oversize concrete blocks. The volumes of the various living spaces fill in the frame, starting with one quadrant on the top floor and concluding with three quadrants, four floors below at the living-room level. Unfilled quadrants provide steplike sequences of exterior terraces. A square staircase located almost at the center of the square plan ties the blunt clarity of the massive exterior, the interior is labyrinthine and intimate. Emphasis on the large openings cut into the cubic mass of the house achieves a monumentality similar to that of the local vernacular."

— from Stuart Wrede. Mario Botta. p24.

The Creator's Words

"It is obvious that if the new architects, the new engineers think in technological terms, the conflict with the ecologists is bound to keep expanding. Whoever constructs, destroys nature, and thus intervention of any kind is always seen as something negative. The real problem, however, seems to me to be to cultivate an understanding that construction transforms only a part of nature, that it should engage in dialogue with nature, and that it is up to us, to this generation, to find the way to resolve the conflict with the stubbornly conservative and their committment to anything which was built in the past."

— Mario Botta. from Emilio Pizzi, with Werner Oechslin and Pierluigi Nicolin. Mario Botta: Architecture 1980-1990. p24.