Mario Botta Stuart Wrede Author Wrede, Stuart Date 1986 Publisher The Museum of Modern Art ISBN 0870702580 Exhibition URL www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1775 The Museum of Modern Art's exhibition history— from our founding in 1929 to the present—is available online. It includes exhibition catalogues, primary documents, installation views, and an index of participating artists. MoMA © 2017 The Museum of Modern Art '1—j.iL-" lit jJiii 'iJ - ! < j. j-.. ; jjud; j-..; j. 3»R - Mario Botta The Museum of Modern Art, New York Mario Botta /'I X / \ 1/1/1 Mario Botta Stuart Wrede The Museum of Modem Art, New York The exhibition and catalogue are part of the Gerald D. Hines Interests Architecture Program at The Museum of Modem Art, New York /\ rchou-4 Published on the occasion of the exhibition Mario Botta jj A November 20, 1986-February 10, 1987 organized by Stuart Wrede, Curator [If- Department of Architecture and Design The Museum of Modern Art Tour of the exhibition: School of Architecture, Rice University, Houston March— April 1987 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art September— October 1987 Copyright © 1986 by The Museum of Modern Art All rights reserved Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number 86-62324 Certain illustrations are covered by claims to copyright noted on page 72. ISBN 0-87070-258-0 Edited by Harriet Schoenholz Bee Designed by Vignelli Associates Photography by Adriano Heitmann Production by Daniel Frank Typeset by Trufont Typographers, Hicksville, N.Y. Printed and bound by Eastern Press, Inc., New Haven, Conn. Distributed outside the United States and Canada by Thames and Hudson Ltd. , London The Museum of Modern Art 11 West 53 Street New York, New York 10019 Printed in the United States of America cover: House, Breganzona, Switzerland . 1984 Front facade frontispiece: House, Morbio Superiore, Switzerland . 1982—83 Sketch The Museum f Modern Art Library Acknowledgments On behalf of the Trustees of The Museum of Modern Art, I wish to thank Mario Botta, without whose enthusiasm this exhibition would not have been possible. He and his staff assisted me with great patience and prepared numerous drawings for the exhibition. Special thanks go to Riccardo Blumer, Luigi Fontana, and Alessandro Mensa of Bottas office, who coordinated the preparation of the material for the exhibition, and to Mauro Mauri, Roberto Vismara, and Remy Bochet, who built the finely crafted models for the exhibition. A beautiful new set of photographs of the buildings was taken by Adriano Heitmann, who worked with great diligence and on a tight schedule to achieve the desired results. At the Museum, I would especially like to thank Arthur Drexler, Director of the Department of Architecture and Design, for his encouragement. I am grateful to Robert Coates for providing essential assistance in preparing the exhibition, to Florence Zaragoza for typing the catalogue and exhibition texts, and to Steven Bluttal and Harry Elson, II, for help in researching photographic material. The sympathetic efforts of Jerome Neuner, Production Manager, Exhibition Program, and Richard Palmer, Coordinator of Exhibitions, have been equally appreciated. For their invaluable work on the catalogue, I am indebted to Harriet Bee for her editorial skills, to Massimo Vignelli and Michael Bierut of Vignelli Associates for their elegant design, and to Daniel Frank for supervising its production. Stephen Sartarellis work as translator of the interview is much appreciated. Finally, the Department of Architecture and Design wishes to express its gratitude to Gerald D. Hines Interests for their generous sponsorship of the program of exhibitions and publications on contemporary architecture of which this is a part. We are especially grateful to Ken Hubbard and Pat Harris of the Hines organization for their active support of our efforts. s.w. Mario Botta wishes to express his gratitude to Pro Helvetia for financial assistance in transporting the models. He also wishes to thank, in addition to those mentioned above, the following members of his office staff: Maurizio Pelli, Ferruccio Robbiani, Urs Kulling, Mischa Groh, Daniele Eisenhut, Paolo Merzaghi, Gianfranco Agazzi, Carlos Heras, Massimo Moreni, Andreina Bellorini, Ugo Eriih, Marta Ferrari, Ueli Brauen, Isabella Gaggini, Marino Beretta, and Monica Grassi. Contents Mario Botta and the Modernist Tradition 8 Projects Houses Riva San Vitale, Switzerland, 1972—73 24 Ligornetto, Switzerland, 1975—76 26 Massagno, Switzerland, 1979—81 28 Pregassona, Switzerland, 1979 30 Stabio, Switzerland, 1980—81 32 Viganello, Switzerland, 1981—82 34 Morbio Superiore, Switzerland, 1982—83 36 Breganzona, Switzerland, 1984 38 Morbio Inferiore, Switzerland, 1986 40 Buildings School, Morbio Inferiore, Switzerland, 1972—77 42 Library, Capuchin Monastery, Lugano, Switzerland, 1976—79 44 Artisan Center, Balerna, Switzerland, 1977—79 46 Office Building, Lugano, Switzerland, 1981-85 48 Bank of Gotthard, Lugano, Switzerland, 1982-86 50 Cultural Center, Chambery, France, 1982—86 52 Library, Villeurbanne, France, 1984 54 Gallery, Tokyo, Japan, 1985 56 Row Housing, Pregassona, Switzerland, 1985 58 Thyssen-Bornemisza Gallery, Lugano, Switzerland, 1986 60 Urban Design Urban Housing, Turin, Italy, 1985 62 7 Interview with Mario Botta 64 Mario Botta and the Modernist Tradition The Museum of Modern Art's first exhibition in the Gerald D. Hines Interests Architecture Program was devoted to the work of Leon Krier and Ricardo Bohll, two architects who consider the modern movement a failure and propose their own versions of a return to classicism. The second exhibition in this series focuses on the architecture of Mario Botta, whose work has played an important role in the revitalization and renewal of modern architecture. At age forty-three, Mario Botta has practiced architecture for nearly twenty-five years. He got an early start: dropping out of secondary school when he was fifteen because he found it boring, he apprenticed, almost by chance, to the architectural firm of Carloni and Camenisch, in Lugano, and quickly discovered that architecture was his calling. His first built works date from this period. After a three-year apprenticeship, he went back to school to acquire a baccalaureate, and then a professional degree from the architecture school in Venice. Botta graduated in 1969, a time of intense student radicalism, and was the only candidate for a degree who chose Carlo Scaipa, then regarded as a conservative formalist, as his thesis critic. In 1970 Botta established his own architectural practice in Lugano. During Botta's four years in Venice both Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn designed important projects for that city. With a combination of single-minded determination and youthful enthusiasm, Botta persuaded both architects to hire him; he worked for Le Corbusier on the Venice hospital during his first year in the city, and for Kahn on the convention center exhibition just after he graduated. Luck, but also a clear sense of direction, led Botta into contact with Le Corbusier, Kahn, and Scarpa. Fittingly, he has built on their tradition. Mario Botta first gained international attention with a remarkable series of houses in Switzerland, modest in budget and scale but of strong monumentality. While clearly modernist, these houses also have ties to the vernacular architecture of Botta's native canton of Ticino as well as to the classical tradition. Set in a spectacular landscape of hills and lakes on the southern slopes of the Swiss Alps, they evoke a clear sense of place, their bold, archetypal geometric forms often echoing those of the local vernacular. Built of ascetic materials, beautifully crafted, tactile, and sensual, they comprise a rich set of variations on a few basic themes that 8 have begun to define a new modern domestic type which, like 1 its classical precedents, is axially organized and presents a powerful symmetrical image, or figure. Botta's recent large-scale urban projects build upon many of the formal themes developed in his private houses and, like them, express his preoccupation with context. In these projects he has succeeded in defining a viable alternative to those seeking to destroy the fabric of the traditional city and to those who would preserve the historic city at a certain moment in time. Botta's formulation, "A newness of the old and an archeology of the new," conveys a sense both of historic continuity and of present-day innovation. In all his work the context is an important point of departure, whether by context is meant landscape, urban fabric, local building tradition, or past and present culture. And for him that context includes the modernist tradition in architecture. But Botta's modernism is not Utopian. It neither pursues a machine aesthetic nor asserts the primacy of function in generating form, although current critiques would so characterize all of modernism. Botta's modernism is part of a movement away from the technological and functional determinism of the 1920s, which came to be known as the International Style, toward a man-centered modernism that sought fundamentals within a more humanist framework, using as points of departure archaic, primitive, and vernacular sources. The idea was not to copy these sources but to understand their underlying principles of form, construction, and psychology. Paralleling contemporary ethnography, in which primitive peoples were studied in order to get beneath the encrusted layers of "culture" in Western societies to the "purer" states of man, this modernist tradition similarly sought to strip architecture of its layers of style and ornamentation in search of the timeless. This move away from International Style functionalism was first apparent in the gradual appropriation and reinterpretation of the Mediterranean vernacular in the 1930s by Le Corbusier, which evolved into his archaizing, beton brut postwar work. Similarly, by 1935 in Scandinavia, Erik Gunnar Asplund and Alvar Aalto moved away from the International Style by reintegrating the vernacular and classical into their work. A renewed interest in rooting their architecture to the earth and using natural materials emerged, partly inspired by their discovery of Frank Lloyd Wright's work of the 1930s.