A memory of Vittorio Gregotti
April 20 2020
Vittorio Gregotti (Novara, August 10, 1927 – Milan, March 15, 2020) was an Italian architect, urban planner and architecture theorist. As part of Triennale Decameron, Stefano Boeri, architect and President of Triennale Milano, together with Pierluigi Nicolin, architecture critic and director of Lotus magazine, and Marco De Michelis, architectural historian, recalled the most important moments of Gregotti's professional and personal life.
Un ricordo di Vittorio Gregotti, Stefano Boeri, Pierluigi Nicolin e Marco De Michelis
Audio (Italian)
”Two things come to my mind when I think of Gregotti. First of all, the splendour of the 1960s, when a conceptual, almost avant-garde idea of Italian architecture was introduced: the idea of the project, of the territory, as Gregotti explained in his book Il territorio dell’architettura, and how the competitions of that time were a laboratory for this new type of architecture. The project that best expresses these utopian ideals is the University of Calabria, built in the 1970s: a great work of land-art.“
Pierluigi Nicolin
Gregotti Associati, Università della Calabria, Cosenza, 1974. Fonte Artribune
”The second thing is the period of Gregotti Associati, which I experienced in person; it was a period of great works. For Italian architecture, big number were made by many individual projects at that time. It was a moment that made people talk, but that was part of Gregotti’s personality.“
Pierluigi Nicolin
Gregotti Associati, Università della Calabria, Cosenza, 1974. From Domus 673, June 1986
“I remember the Triennale Kaleidoscope project. It reversed the conventional terms and expectations that I had for architecture back then.”
Pierluigi Nicolin
In his long career, Vittorio Gregotti took part in numerous Triennale Milano International Exhibitions; in particular, together with Umberto Eco, he curated the introductory section of the XIII Triennale of 1964, entitled Tempo libero.
XIII Triennale di Milano, 1964, Tempo libero. Caleidoscopio, curated by Vittorio Gregotti and Umberto Eco. From Triennale Milano Archivi
“In the Bicocca project, Vittorio created a sort of autobiography in stone, a variation starting from his architectural encyclopedias; it was an important moment from historical and critical perspectives.”
Stefano Boeri
Vittorio Gregotti, Università Milano Bicocca, 1986-99. From Artribune
Vittorio Gregotti was the editor-in-chief of architecture magazine Casabella from issue 478, March 1982, to issues 630-631, January 1996. As highlighted by Stefano Boeri: “Vittorio was editor, editor-in-chief and finally director of a magazine that built a way of thinking about architecture and the city in the 1980s.” Marco De Michelis, part of the magazine’s editorial staff under the direction of Gregotti, recalled: “for Vittorio, Casabella was not just about information, but also about learning”.
Casabella 486, December 1982, editor-in-chief Vittorio Gregotti
"Architettura come modificazione", Casabella 498-499, January-February 1984, editor-in-chief Vittorio Gregotti
"Giappone: una modernità dis-orientata", Casabella 608-609, January-February 1994, editor-in-chief Vittorio Gregotti
"Internazionalismo critico", Casabella 630-631, January-February 1996, editor-in-chief Vittorio Gregotti
“He had an extremely generous idea of sharing knowledge. He knew visual arts and music as much as he knew architecture. And it was all part of his design process. He was a true author but his work was always the result of a collective thinking.”
Marco De Michelis
Vittorio Gregotti, Case a Cannaregio, Venezia, 1981-86. From Artribune
