The Cervo is a building in the municipality of Locarno, purchased by Elisabeth and Luciano Fonti with immediate transfer of ownership and possession on Thursday, September 18, 1969. The Cervo has a house area of 178m2 and a courtyard with an area of 77m2. The total area is therefore 255m2.

After purchase, they ran the four-floor building for more than forty years as a restaurant and small hotel. Nowadays, after the grandparents Elisabeth and Luciano passed away, the Cervo is uninhabited, and decisions need to be made about what its future will be. Laura Fonti, the writer of this thesis and one of their granddaughters, decided to face and reflect on this matter during her study of Process Design at HyperWerk of the HGK Basel.

This decision was not a coincidence but more of an unconscious realization of the deep and present connection to the Cervo through the image “Il dolce far niente” (the sweetness of doing nothing) found in a drawer on a routine visit to the uninhabited building. That was the beginning of a process with lots of ups, downs, and barriers, aiming to create and perhaps one day implement a concept that would revalue and give a second life to the Cervo.

The approach chosen was not to start from a concrete idea but to believe in the whole process, its reflections, its research, and to embrace its changes due to external inputs.

Reflections were made about the accessibility of an uninhabited building, the share of privileges associated with it, its openness and liveliness. All this while keeping the discourse regarding the use of empty properties open and innovative. Research was conducted on steward-ownership as a legal form for socio-cultural gathering places and on temporary use as a method for the initial appropriation of vacant buildings. Some linguistic challenges were encountered between legislation, information, and regions.

Finally, interactions with family, friends, co-students, mentor Sabine Fisher and people active in the socio-cultural sector in the cities of Basel and Locarno, proved crucial to the thesis and is one of its core focuses.

The general theme of this thesis is the evolution of failure and loss of motivation arising from the attempt to persuade and convince the Fonti family to consider a process design approach instead of a conventional, profit-focused one. The evolution is broken down into various stages and narrated in chronological order. At the end of each step, an explanation of why that step ultimately failed is given.

This process of new attempts and failures is the reason why this thesis is titled “Diary of a Nonrealization”.