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.
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 Centro Cultural de Belém in Lisbon, Portugal, the Stadio Luigi Ferraris di Genova, and others.
Gregotti has published several books, including Inside Architecture (1996) from The MIT Press, and Architecture, Means and Ends (2010), translated by Lydia Chochrane, from the University of Chicago Press.
2 Comments
So very sad to lose perhaps the last of his generation of one of the great architects of post-war Italy, born during the Inter-war years. Gio Ponti, Ernesto Rogers, Gino Valle, Giancarlo De Carlo. Gregotti was not just an important "designer," he was one of the central intellects of Italy's recovery from Fascism and its debate between continuity (continuità) with its long and (recently) troubled past, and the drive to embrace an internationalism.
During the 1980s, when many embraced either a picturesque manner of reinvesting historical forms or a radical distancing from an architecture parlante, Gregotti wrote and practiced a middle ground that argued for the value of architecture engaged in the complexities and nuances of site. There is so much that students of architecture could and should learn from his legacy of word and image.
That he could have survived Fascism, Nazis, and Silvio Berlusconi, to die of Covid-19, is doubly sad.
super sad.
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