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The architect Vittorio Gregotti died today at 92 years of age from pneumonia taxed by the coronavirus. The Italian master contributed to drawing the urban landscape of Italy, which remembers him as one of the fathers of modern architecture for his straight line designs and his idea of ​​urban planning.

Gregotti was admitted to the San Giuseppe clinic in Milan and has died from this pandemic that is plaguing the entire country, with more than 21,000 infected and at least 1,441 deaths, according to the latest data.

Gregotti participated in the redesign of the Stadium and the Olympic Ring of the Spanish city of Barcelona for the 1992 Olympic Games, along with Carles Buxade, Joan Margarit, Alfonso Milà and Federico Correa.

The news of his death was precisely given by another of the great architects of the contemporary world, Stefano Boeri, for whom he was "a master of international architecture" , but also an "essayist, critic, editorialist, polemicist and statesman".

Gregotti was born in 1927 in the Piedmontese city of Novara and from a young job in his father's textile factory in that city, along with his brother Enrico, two years younger, and graduated in Architecture in 1952 from the Polytechnic of Milan.

After his studies he moved to the United States, specifically to Boston, New York and Chicago, where he came into contact with other great figures such as Mies van der Rohe and knew the work of many others such as Frank Lloyd Wright .

But it is to Milan that he was and will always be linked.

Not in vain its mayor, Giuseppe Sala, assured that the city "owes him a great deal" since he made his first room in the prestigious Triennial in 1951 until the project for the remodeling of the Bicocca neighborhood, in its industrial northeast.

With his straight-line, concise and industrial style, Gregotti configured, with his great reconversion plans, this entire area where universities and headquarters of companies like Pirelli are located .

But also one of the cultural poles of Milan, the Arcimboldi Theater , the largest in Italy and the second in Europe, a structure covered by a sloping glass roof initially designed to host La Scala opera performances.

However, his signature is not limited only to modern Milan but also reached other parts of Italy, such as Genoa (northwest), where he built the "Luigi Ferraris" stadium , or the Sicilian Palermo (south), where he planned the rehabilitation from the ZEN neighborhood, which was not culminated by gangster infiltrations in the tenders.

Gregotti ended up becoming an architect of international fame and participated in the design of the Stadium and the Olympic Ring of the Spanish city of Barcelona for the 1992 Games, along with Carles Buxade, Joan Margarit, Alfonso Milà and Federico Correa. He also created the Belém Cultural Center in Lisbon, the largest in all of Portugal.

A voracious reader and passionate about lyrical music, philosophy and art, the teacher also dedicated himself to teaching at faculties in Venice, Milan or Palermo and taught half the world, from Buenos Aires to Harvard or Cambridge .

In 1974 he founded his own studio, "Gregorio Associati", after having been a disciple of Ernesto Nathan Rogers.

Gregotti rejected the idea of ​​the star of architecture and considered that this discipline was "a team effort and not a stage", in an interview with "La Stampa" a year ago.

In the pages of the Turin newspaper, he believed that the current state of architecture is "a real disaster" because it limits itself "to creating images and surprising", while the underlying idea of ​​the profession must "respond to the precise social needs".

He acquired his vision of the order of space in his father's factory, but his idea of ​​architecture marked a "fundamental" reading of his life, "The Buddenbrooks", by Thomas Mann, "the sharpest narration of the parable of the industrial bourgeoisie "he referred.

Throughout his life he participated in numerous international exhibitions and was responsible for the introductory section of the XIII Milan Triennial in 1964, which awarded him the Gold Medal in 2012.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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  • Italy
  • Portugal
  • U.S
  • Europe
  • theater
  • culture
  • Covid 19
  • Coronavirus
  • Architecture
  • Barcelona

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