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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... View full entry
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... View full entry
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... View full entry
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... View full entry
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 — T Magazine
Nancy Hass pens a paean to Villa Borsani for T Magazine. View full entry
"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." — Places Journal
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... View full entry
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... View full entry
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... — the New York Times
