Archinect - News

Beloved Italian designer and architect Gaetano Pesce passes away at 84

2024-04-04T18:05:00-04:00

Gaetano Pesce, the critically acclaimed Italian architect and designer of thought-provoking furniture, has passed away in New York City at the age of 84. He will be remembered for a groundbreaking career that spanned six decades and saw his many designs scattered across four continents and collected by major worldwide institutions, including MoMA, Vitra Design Museum, and Centre Pompidou.

After beginning his career as an industrial designer in Italy in the 1960s, the 2023 Andrée Putman Lifetime Achievement Award winner turned into one of the leading figures behind the Radical Design movement. His contributions included the Up5 chair he made for B&B Italia, the Moloch floor lamp, and other artistic pieces that commented on politics and society through its heyday until the end of the 1970s.

Up Chair series by Gaetano Pesce, 1969. Photo courtesy Créateurs Design Awards

He would later move to New York to teach at Pratt Institute in 1980, a position he held in addition to running a simul...

Influential Italian postmodernist architect Paolo Portoghesi passes away aged 91

2023-05-31T15:04:00-04:00

An important driver of postmodernism in Italy has been lost following the death of Italian architect, theorist, and historian Paolo Portoghesi in his native country this week at the age of 91.

The author of the 2000 title Nature and Architecture enjoyed a long and influential academic career in Italy while simultaneously working to complete several important religious and cultural commissions such as the Mosque of Rome, Strasbourg Mosque, Casa Baldi, and Theatre of Cagliari as an architect following his graduation from the Sapienza University of Rome in 1957.

Portoghesi also served as President of the Venice Biennale from 1979 to1992 and was a notable participant in the Documenta 5 exhibition and other key artistic exhibitions across Europe during the same time period. His teaching career began the previous decade at his alma mater, where his renowned expertise in Baroque architecture was further enabled via a collaborative relationship with his friend and mentor, Bruno Zevi.

The C...

Umberto Riva has passed away in Italy at age 93

2021-07-01T12:48:00-04:00

Multiple news outlets are reporting that Umberto Riva has died in Italy at the age of 93.

The Italian architect was referred to as a maestro by his contemporaries who reacted to news of the passing of the architect and painter last week in Palermo.

Born to a Milanese family in 1928, Riva studied in Venice before eventually obtaining an apprenticeship in the office of Carlo Scarpa. Major works included the redevelopment of Piazza San Nazaro and the Biblioteca Europea, both in Milan; power plants in Campobasso and Termoli; a restored café in Padua; and several successful lamps for the Italian studio Tacchini.

Riva was widely known for a wide array of projects ranging from his stately private residences, well-lit interiors spaces, and designs for furniture that incorporated Riva’s sense of luminescence while communicating a simplicity of form reminiscent of his lifelong influence, Constantin Brâncuși.

“My work is constantly fostered and tested by my being in this world. Plus, there is...

Vittorio Gregotti, Italian Neo-Avant Garde architect, has died from COVID-19

2020-03-16T11:31:00-04:00

Vittorio Gregotti, the noted Italian architect who helped initiate the inaugural architecture section of the Venice Biennale in the late 1970s, has passed away due to complications arising from COVID-19, The Guardian reports.

Gregotti was born in 1927 and was educated at the Politecnico di Milanoin the early 1950s. As a deeply political and concerned designer, Gregotti worked across genres, including as an architect, writer, editor, and curator and was a notable member of the Italian Communist Party.

The stadio Luigi Ferraris in Genoa. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons / Gabriel Rinaldi.

In 1976, Gregotti became the director of the Visual Arts Section of the Biennale, a role that he used to institute a more significant architectural focus for the exhibition. He was the director of the 1978 Biennale and created an exhibition around the theme of Utopia and the Crisis of Anti-Nature: Architectural Intentions in Italy.

Gregotti also built several significant commissions, including the...

Brainy and bold but awash in subtle pastels and sun

2019-08-12T13:00:00-04:00

The palazzo itself is a combination of classical and Modernist elements — a fusion of Art Deco and Baroque flourishes, with sophisticated hand-hewn details, a historical pastiche that tracks both Borsani’s own aesthetic evolution as well as 20th-century Italian design. Made from a series of connected boxes

Nancy Hass pens a paean to Villa Borsani for T Magazine.

When in Rome

2018-07-10T22:46:00-04:00

"Along with their monumental role in Rome's urban fabric, the architectural status of fountains has long been uncertain. It can be hard to determine when they ceased to be viewed as public water utilities, and came to be regarded as purely artistic objects."

In the same week in 2016, a group of tourists were denounced as trespassers for splashing around in one of Rome's historic fountains, while Fendi was praised for its tribute to Italy's artistic legacy by staging a fashion show across another. Anatole Tchikine is prompted by these contrasting reactions to examine the complicated relationship between architecture, water, and the body in the city — from early modern laundresses to La Dolce Vita.

Ettore Sottsass works in David Bowie's Memphis collection head to auction

2016-10-13T13:22:00-04:00

On November 11th in London, Sotheby's will be auctioning off the late great David Bowie's Memphis, Milano collection, which includes works by architect and designer Ettore Sottsass, Aldo Cibic, and Michele De Lucchi, among others. The works embody the Memphis movement's 1980s philosophy of 'New Design' which basically serves as the thesis for postmodernism, or as the movement's website puts it, "a new expressivity in the form of new shapes, materials and patterns."

For more on the intersection between music and design:

Here's a dose of design inspiration from Superstudio, the radical 1960s "anti-architecture" collective whose influence continues today

2016-04-13T18:23:00-04:00

HALF A CENTURY AGO, a group of 20-something architecture students from Florence decided to assume the small task of conceiving an alternative model for life on earth. Contemptuous of the long reign of Modernism, which they felt had sold itself as a cure to society’s ills and never delivered, they were jazzed by American science-fiction novels and the political foment of the 1960s. They gave themselves the colorfully assured name Superstudio...