Italo Rota, the architect of the Museo del Novecento, has died – Corriere.it

The architect Italo Rota died on Saturday April 6th in Milan, where he was born in 1953.

One day, after September 11th, we traveled as a delegation to the USA to present the Museo del Novecento in Milan. And he, Italo Rota, The museum’s designer appeared at the airport barefoot, dressed in a toe-length purple coat that he had bought in India, where he had just completed the construction of a sanctuary: apparently he was stopped at the border between the suspects. But the only thing that made us suspicious were his volcanic ideas, sometimes extravagant (like the legendary Bagonghi, symbol of Milan), playful, free, that’s what we always have to do… You should always do it… And finally the idea that drones leave us food in the courtyards of their homes or that containers become mobile hospitals where every citizen leaves their own in museums Memorabilia (like his in Reggio Emilia) or that you can build a factory starting from a video game. Italo Rota died on Saturday, April 6th, aged 70, in the Milan clinic where he was hospitalized for a cruel illness.

After graduating from the Polytechnic, you began working with Vittorio Gregotti at the University of Calabria Gae Aulenti at the Muse d’Orsay, who was also his creation. From 1976 to 1981, together with Pierluigi Nicolin, he founded the magazine Lotus, which served as a training ground for his inclination for theoretical thinking and his love for books and magazines: he collected the magazines of modernism and the gray Russian constructivists, as well as many toy soldiers. In France he also worked for and designed the theater and the Louvre (la Cour Carr). promenade from Nantes (1995) and years later (2005) from Palermo.

Fu the architect of the stylist Roberto Cavalli, for which he built a villa in Florence, shops with moray eels stretching across a window, and the Just Cavalli Café, the destination of a Milan animal which he did not attend because he loved being at home and cooking with his cats and his wife (the set designer Margherita Palli). He embodied a certain cultured, free postmodernism and was part of the history of the shift from kitsch to the fusion of genres to create a new vision of interiors. The stylists’ was ephemeral architecture, he said, but a narrative vision, a catalog of inspirations. Creating temporary happiness with architecture was his vision, which he often used – he is so sweet, almost mystical and with an attitude towards Japanese culture excess the technology, the robotization, which he really liked. Architecture was no longer measured by its long duration; it perhaps did not even exceed the architect’s life: however, for the director Luca Ronconi he built a tomb in the Etruscan style that will defy the millennia. He loved tailor-made homes for everyone, with extreme comfort to make people happy: Jeff Koons style architecture.

epoch scientific advisor by Naba (New Academy of Fine Arts Milan), Award-winning designer, creative rather than old-fashioned architect. In Milan, Rota was also a city councilor for urban quality in the municipal council of Lega member Marco Formentini (he was a staunch pro-European, in this respect a little). glocal like Philippe Daverio). He designed the Kuwait pavilion for the Ambrosiana Expo 2015 and the exhibition at the Triennale together with Germano Celant Kitchens & Intruders about the power that food has in society, but also with the reconstruction of Gabriele d’Annunzio’s cuisine. For the Dubai Expo (2021) he created the Italian pavilion, the roof of which was formed by the tricolor boats.

I never understood how such a poetic man with such great historical culture could fall in love with him high technological performance (as in the highly robotic Elatech factories in Bergamo and Sit in Cusago), logistics, digital, becomes a kind of 3D Ganesh god, an inventor who comes from a forest in Avalon. And then those who knew him or enjoyed him as a friend will now remember his voice, so gentle: he, so free from hypocrisy, allergic to banality, so spontaneous, so precious, so fragile as a verse by Jacques Prvert.