Editor’s note

Doing a magazine is like writing a book or making a movie; you never know what you’ll end up with and not knowing is part of the amusement. You start because you think you have something to say, something urgent or different or new, something very important, maybe even vital. What you want to communicate is not necessarily a thought, a line of argument or an idea with a beginning and an end, but more often — as now — a mood, an atti-tude a predilection of the soul, a vision bearing the faintest blur of utopia. The photos, the draw-ings, the captions, the words, the titles, the paper, the page format, the typesetting, even the advertis-ing and the sponsors, everything, even the cover price, add up to a magazine and blend like the in-gredients of a cake to communicate a taste, an aspiration, a desire embodied by that very object.

Then there is the name. Terrazzo is an Italian word that means terrace or balcony. It is an out-door place accessible from indoors where, de-pending on the size and the climate, you can sit, chat and look around. It is also an architectural element. The idea of terrazzo in Italian is associat-ed with leisure and relaxation, with a general feel-ing of physical and psychological well-being. In English the same word means “a mosaic flooring made by embedding small pieces of marble or granite in mortar and polishing”. Nothing to do with a terrace, and yet the two meanings are not totally alien, belonging as they do to the same fam-ily of associations. Both words share the idea of hardness,, of stone, of building and also the idea of leisure suggested in English by the multicolored pleasantness of the material. Names always carry with them a magic aura, a mysterious power. I like to think that Terrazzo can call forth the sum of both meanings in the two languages and be enhanced by their qualities. Terrazzo is not involved with news, new products, fairs, conventions, letters, reviews, reportages, etc. It is a_place of encounter among people and things of different origin. A little like Epicurus’s Garden, attended in Athens also by slaves and hetaeras (and in fact since his own time Epicurus has been hounded by endless as much as senseless slander). Inevitably the people who meet in the garden get along with each other and this is one more positive side of such an undertaking: to create new ties and friendships, to exchange ideas and enthusiasm.

Terrazzo was bom, and I hope it will grow spurred by the enthusiasms and passions of many people, people that may have nothing to do with it and never will but have indirectly ispired it. In my intention and in the intentions of the friends with whom I have worked, Terrazzo should become a very sophisticated object, sophisticated not in the sense of raffine but in that of the complexity and quantity of emotions and impressions it can ex-press. To broaden its empathic qualities, we have tried to make it physically attractive; we have paid great attention to the different types of paper, to printing, to colors, to the photographs, and have followed very closely every word, the empty spaces, the sense of continuity and ihe necessary discrepancies. But more than anything else we have tried to raise problems not to solve them; to fondle the imagination without imposing a direc-tion; to soothe emotional ghosts of different ages and extraction in order to gather them around the theme of architecture and living. It is not a matter of summarising and not even of updating. What we all desire at the end is to get rid of tiredness by slipping unto a perfumed bath and then to put on a beautiful new dress.

Barbara Radice