Forays beyond the Modern – The Architecture of Umberto Riva

An anthology. The book focuses on the figure of Umberto Riva (1928-2021), one of the masters of Italianarchitecture, designerand painter. A student of Carlo Scarpa, he inherited from him the artistic and artisanal attitude of the project, the taste for open forms and the sensitivity for an operational scale that extends from the material detail to the landscape. His work ranges from the design of objects and lamps where light becomes the protagonist, to urban housing projects, private and public buildings, exhibition installations and an important painting parenthesis.
The book is conceived as an anthology in which the texts of the author Maria Bottero open and close a series of critical essays taken from out-of-print books. It is a mixture of early and more contemporary essays, with the aim of offering a range of critical evolutions around the architect as wide as possible. A precious collaboration with the architect’spersonal archive and with the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal allowed to retrieve and present his sketches and drawings to the public. Maria Bottero (1932), architect, was professor at the Polytechnic School of Milan. From 1963 to 1974 she was editor-in-chief of the international architecture magazine Zodiac, founded by Adriano Olivetti.