Cotton

Cotton takes its title from a place: Genoa’s Magazzini del Cotone, built as general warehouses in the late nineteenth century, turned into a cotton depot the following century, today renewed as cinemas, shops, congress spaces — an architecture that has already passed through its own metamorphosis, and carries it visibly on its surface.

Nearby, trees hold every tempo of that same change within a single walk: branches still bare, the bud waiting; canopies already dense, the leaf arrived; and, on certain limbs, the two states meeting at once, naked wood beside new growth.

The building’s transformation is singular and complete, worn on its surface for anyone to read. The trees carry the whole cycle at once — waiting, arrival, threshold — held together in a single body. Cotton is a study in tempo: matter revealing, side by side, every stage of its own becoming.