Juan Lopez Cano, sleeping with books

When Urbanità Spontanee has finally been published, at the end of February 2020, we had imagined to present it to Leporello this spring. Or was it better in the summer? Then the virus came, the confinement, the Zoom video calls and everything we know well … What the fuck! We had to change plans. In the meantime, the book arrived at the bookstore and began to find a space, between full shelves, posters hung with pins and exhibitions to be shown via the web. This is where the idea of ​​sleeping with books was born, an attempt to relate the content of Urbanità Spontanee with thoughts, ideas and influences that have followed me throughout my career and that are right there, inside the Leporello spaces.

I went to sleep in the library, to have time to be alone with all that pile of bound, stapled, glued paper and with disruptive covers, strange shapes and sometimes uncomfortable reading concepts. But they are all awesome!!! I dusted the somewhat forgotten section of architecture, leafed through only-images books – the lazy readers’ guilty pleasure – and discovered the secrets of the back room. The result is 33 stories, 6 posts of books from my personal library and some stupid video. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

Juan López Cano, architect and PhD in Architecture and Construction – Space and Society (La Sapienza University – Rome). In 2005, after getting a degree in Arts History from Granada University (Spain) – specialized in Urban, Architecture and Design History – he moved to Rome.

In 2010 he founded Orizzontale, an architectural practice that researches on the process of urban waste reactivation. Together with Orizzontale, he promotes projects of relational public spaces and actions on common spaces. He also has worked as a consultant for Zona (photographers and photo-editors group) and as an assistant to teaching in the architectural design courses at La Sapienza architecture faculty. In addition to public space, he works in interiors design and renovation and, at the beginning of 2016, he collaborated with One-Works Milan, a firm in charge of construction, design and management for mass transportation means. He currently works with Médecins Sans Frontières, building infrastructures and promoting the access to primary healthcare in African and in central and south American countries. He edited, together to Luca Reale and Federica Fava, “Spazi d‘Artifizio, dialoghi sulla città temporanea” (Quodlibet, 2016). In February 2020 he published his first monograph with Libria publishing house, Urbanità Spontanee.