Aldo’s clients came to him because they saw something different in his work. Each building stood apart, showed itself to be completely unrelated to any of his previous projects, grounded in their local context and all together reaching near perfection. Aldo was very picky about who he worked with. Each potential client went through a rigorous testing and interview process to determine whether they would be a fit for him. He carefully separated the wheat from the chaff, eliminating anyone who showed a hint of being interested in him for the attention or status and cutting out anyone who didn’t truly understand or believe in him or his process. After all, he would sometimes go years without speaking with a client once the project had begun. That was why it was imperative for him to find people who identified with what he was doing and were still willing to fund the project though he would disappear for the greater part of a year. They had to see it was that solitude by the lake which allowed him to achieve such excellence in all his work.
Upon his arrival at the lake house every fall, he would find pallets upon pallets of building materials stacked outside his workshop. Multiple species of lumber, stones from various quarries, various types of glass, concrete mix, and anything related to the current project vernacular. All these materials would serve in his experiments, testing how elements could be put together, what arrangements worked best, and what didn’t. By the end of each of these lake house trips, he would have a series of mockups in his workshop, all of which would be torn down when he left, but he usually left with a grasp of what direction the design needed to take.
A Page a Day 