Italian architect and urban planner Vittorio Gregotti died on March 15 at the 93rd year of his life from pneumonia caused by the coronavirus COVID-19. Gregotti and his wife, Mariana Mazza, were admitted to Milan's San Giuseppe Hospital in early March.
“Italy has lost not only an architect, but also an essayist, critic, teacher, editor, polemicist, administrator, who created the history of our culture. He perceived architecture as a view of the whole world and for life,”said Stefano Boeri, President of the Milan Triennial, about Gregotti's death.
Vittorio Gregotti was born in Novara in northwestern Italy in 1927, graduated from the Polytechnic University of Milan in 1952, although in 1947 he managed to practice in Paris with the Perret brothers. Another teacher Gregotti called Ernesto Nathan Rogers, one of the founders of BBPR. From 1953 to 1968 he worked in collaboration with Ludovico Meneghetti and Giotto Stoppino, and in 1974 he founded the studio Gregotti Associati International. In addition, Gregotti taught architecture at the universities of Venice, Milan and Palermo.
One of the founders of the neorationalist movement in architecture, Gregotti carefully studied the experience of not only Western European, but also Soviet avant-garde artists. In 1966, he formulated his ideas in an essay-manifesto "The Territory of Architecture".
“To fight with nature or to comprehend it, to extract dialectical aspects from its unity, to organize geometrically or, by breaking a garden, to make an ideal, improved, cosmological model out of it, an earthly paradise, a nature favorable to human being opposed to wild nature, or a mirror truth and kindness inherent in a person are interpretations that have always found their exact and definite answers in architecture”(translation by Anna Vyazemtseva).
According to Gregotti, in the design it is necessary to focus not on a separate building, but on the street, block and area, while the architectural form can be independent of the function. He noted that an architect should pay maximum attention to historical buildings. The book went through five editions, the most recent in 2014.
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zooming 1/4 Teatro Arcimboldi, Milan. 2002 Photo © Dmitry Goncharuk
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zooming 2/4 Teatro Arcimboldi, Milan. 2002 Photo © Dmitry Goncharuk
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zooming 3/4 Teatro Arcimboldi, Milan. 2002 Photo © Dmitry Goncharuk
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zooming 4/4 Teatro Arcimboldi, Milan. 2002 Photo © Dmitry Goncharuk
In total, Gregotti and his studio have more than 1.5 thousand architectural projects. Among the most significant are the Olympic Stadium in Barcelona, the Luigi Ferraris stadium in Genoa, the renovation of the industrial area of Bicocca in the north of Milan with the construction of the Arcimboldi theater and the university complex, the theater in Aix-en-Provence, the Belém cultural center in Lisbon, the Church of San Massimiliano -Colbe in Bergamo. The most controversial of the projects is the ZEN social housing block in Palermo, which was not completed and received numerous criticisms from both critics and residents of the houses.
Gregotti's studio has also undertaken a variety of interior projects, including cruise liners, graphic design, such as the international edition of Lotus magazine and books from Electa.
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zooming 1/3 Social housing in Cannaregio in Venice. 1981-2001 Photo © Dmitry Goncharuk
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zooming 2/3 Social housing in Cannaregio in Venice. 1981-2001 Photo © Dmitry Goncharuk
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zooming 3/3 Social housing in Cannaregio in Venice. 1981-2001 Photo © Dmitry Goncharuk
In 2001, Vittorio Gregotti came to Moscow, where he gave an open lecture, and a year later he took part in a competition for the design of one of the skyscrapers in Moscow City.
In 1975, Grigotti oversaw the Venice Biennale's Proposito del Mulino Stucky in a huge abandoned granary in Zatter. He agreed to become the director of the Fine Arts Section at the 1976 Biennale, on the condition that there will be a separate exhibition dedicated to architecture. In 1978, the master was again the director of the biennial with the motto "Utopia and the crisis of anti-nature: architectural aspirations in Italy."All this resulted in the fact that the architectural biennale began to alternate in Venice with the biennale of contemporary art and since then has attracted no less attention. The first took place in 1980 under the supervision of Grigotti, and he played this role again four years later.
From 1982 to 1996, Gregotti directed Casabella, a magazine for architects and designers.
“Berlusconi bought the Mondadori publishing house, and his manager Costa fired me because I am leftist. Since then I started writing books,”said Gregotti. In 2000, the work "In the footsteps of Palladio: the reasons and practice of architecture" was published, in 2004 - "The architecture of critical realism", in 2006 "Autobiography of the XX century". Gregotti's latest book, The Mastery of an Architect, was published at the end of 2019.
Gregotti's theoretical works have not yet been translated into Russian, with the exception of the second part of the "Territory of Architecture" - "The Form of the Territory". The translation was made for the magazine "PROJECT international" in 2011 by the historian of architecture Anna Vyazemtseva. “It was the most difficult translation job I have ever done, as a result of which I understood not only what the Italian architects of the stellar generation of modernism were thinking, but also how they thought,” says Vyazemtseva.
