 Mario BottaCampione d´Italia Casino , 1990-2006, Campione d’Italia
GOTTARDO BANK, 1982-1988, Lugano
CHURCH OF ST JOHN THE BAPTIST, 1986–1992, Mogno, Swiss Alps
ANDRÉ MALRAUX THEATER AND HOUSE OF CULTURE 1982–1987, Chambéry
POPE JOHN XXIII CHURCH, 1994–2004, Seriate
POPE JOHN XXIII CHURCH, 1994–2004, Seriate
Born on April 1, 1943, at Mendrisio, Ticino. After an apprenticeship in Lugano he attended art school in Milan and continued his studies at the Venice IUAV (University Institute of Architecture), where he graduated in 1969 under Carlo Scarpa and Giuseppe Mazzariol.
During his time in Venice he met and worked with Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn.
In 1970 he opened his own studio in Lugano and since then has taught at the highest levels, giving lectures, seminars and courses at schools of architecture in Europe, Asia, the United States and Latin America.
In 1976 he was appointed visiting professor at the Lausanne Polytechnic and in 1987 at the Yale School of Architecture, New Haven. In 1983 he was appointed a professor at the Swiss Polytechnic; from 1982 to 1987 he was a member of the Swiss Federal Commission of Fine Arts.
Since his early single-family homes in Canton Ticino, his work has embraced all types of buildings: schools, banks, administrative buildings, libraries, museums and sacred buildings.
In recent years he has been engaged in the creation and founding of the new Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio, where he still teaches and where he served as Director for the academic year 2002-2003.
His work has received numerous international accolades (including the Merit Award for Excellence in Design presented by the AIA for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) and there are many exhibitions devoted to his work. In September 2010 the MART of Trento and Rovereto opened a major retrospective of fifty years of the architect's achievements titled "Mario Botta. Architecture 1960-2010."
His outstanding works include: the André Malraux Theater and House of Culture in Chambéry; the media library in Villeurbanne; the SFMOMA, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Cathedral of the Resurrection in Evry; the Jean Tinguely Museum in Basel; the Cymbalista Synagogue and Jewish Heritage Center in Tel Aviv; the Municipal Library in Dortmund; the Dürrenmatt Center in Neuchâtel; the MART, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto; the Kyobo Tower and Leeum Museum in Seoul; the Tata Consultancy Services office buildings in New Delhi and Hyderabad; the Fondation Bodmer Library and Museum in Cologny; the Pope John XXIII Church and Pastoral Center in Seriate; the restoration of La Scala Opera House in Milan; the church of the Santo Volto in Turin; the Tschuggen Berg Oase Spa in Arosa; the Chateau Faugères winery in Saint-Emilion; the Bechtler Museum in Charlotte; the church of Santa Maria Nuova in Terranova Bracciolini.
WITNESS TO HIS TIME
The memory of the past endures in time. botta shuns the fleeting and
ephemeral. He entrusts his architecture to stone, in a felicitous synthesis of his design aims
Mario Botta lives our time with awareness and sensitivity. He observes above all how short-lived everything has become.
The speed that is a part of our lives makes human activities extremely ephemeral. The rapid, incessant changes in the world have altered the normal life cycles
of things. Everything now last l'espace d'un matin and immediately falls into oblivion.
Yet the past continues to live with us and its memory withstands the ravages of time in the cities of Europe, which have succeeded in preserving it as an enduring record of past ages. Buildings, roads, streets, neighborhoods and monuments erected from the most remote historical periods and following each other in time are a distinctive feature of our world. Taken together they define that specific context where human relationships are originated and develop most easily. The urban agglomerations of other latitudes (Asia and America, to cite the most obvious cases) have, of course, more space and are functional but lack
the richness which the fabric of European cities can still boast as its primacy over other urban models.
In opposition to ephemeral modernity, Botta has always been concerned to bear witness to our time. He therefore designs architecture capable of enduring, respectful of the past without being obsequious to it, impatient of the rules and subverting them to achieve the most advanced and innovative solutions.
In this respect stone perhaps represents the most felicitous epitome of Mario Botta's architectural aims, because of the intrinsic strength of the material, because of its value as a bond with the past, and because it is capable of magnificently interpreting the Swiss architect's flair for adapting such an ancient material to a modern uses and applications.
Together with Stirling and Natalini he was one the earliest and most ardent supporters of the process of revaluing stone and has fostered a revival in architecture with his experiments, starting from the two-color theme, a feature of the work of all three of these architects and used for the outer cladding of buildings of special architectural importance.
The ancient building technique of using bricks to layer the stone courses in walls in order to reconstitute a new plane of support for the following course (the origin of the distinctive character of Romanesque architecture) loses its "constructive" value in the work of the new architects and becomes a merely decorative element which enriches the building.
Botta's two-tone color pattern immediately became a distinctive sign of his unmistakable style and left a profound impression on his work in the first period of his career. The Gottardo Bank is perhaps the best known example of this particular phase. The restrained coloring of the outer stonework, highlighting the measured monumentality of the volumes ranged along the street front, is matched in the interiors by the more brilliant and vivid colors of lighter marble, repeating the motif of alternating two-tone coloring also in wood and metal laminates.
In the André Malraux Theater and House of Culture at Chambéry, the theme of two-tone stripes is further explored and varied in a way closer to traditional construction methods. The two new volumes that Botta created to house respectively a theater with adjoining spaces for the audience, semi-cylindrical
in form, and the stage with the technical annexes, prismatic in form, are marked by horizontal stone courses embedded in the concrete of the structure, an alternation that again recreates the effects of the two-color theme.
Botta shows undeniable wisdom in dealing with projects involving urban contexts, which have to be restored to life or enhanced in value, but he meets the challenges raised by nature with exactly the same capacity. He explores the sense of place in general to identify the opportunities it affords the project itself and contributes, through the physical and historical connotations defining it, to generate a more coherent architectural solution.
At Mogno, a small village in the Swiss Alps, the harsh Alpine environment, which had previously destroyed a seventeenth-century church and swept away part
of the built-up area, provided an opportunity to design a structure that would restore the place of worship to the community. Botta ensured it would withstand the weather and the fierce natural elements while protecting the inhabitants from the mountains above. The stones used here redeem a forgotten skill restored to a new dignity by Botta himself. The master stone masons, the custodians of the ancient tradition of stone working, had been reduced to producing borders and curbstones for the roads, forgotten by all. Now they were again summoned by the architect from Lugano to the task of facing both the interior and exterior of
the building and so motivated to revive abilities and technical skills which were fortunately only dormant.
Stone remains a constant in Botta's work. He uses it regularly without, however, eschewing the elements of novelty that his research suggests. Emblematic of this research is the Pope John XXIII Church and Pastoral Center at Seriate in the province of Bergamo, which rests wholly on the intensive use of Red Verona marble.
The facing of hewn stone is used to cover the whole exterior, thus conferring unity on the various volumes in which the complex is articulated. The use of stone continues into an interior rich in the more refined treatment of the flooring, the skirting board running around the walls, and in the furnishings.
The richness of the interiors, all embodied in the precious hues of the stone, the overhead light shed from skylights in the roof and the wainscoting in panels of laminated wood touched with gold leaf, is crowned by the work of Giuliano Vangi, who sculpted the Resurrection-Crucifixion on the wall on the thickness
of the double apse, using the technique of carving in sunken relief. An imprint sculpted into the living stone evokes the fascination of a technique now largely forgotten, which the artist rediscovered and used in order to give a new force to the representation, animated not only by the tract of carving but above all by the interplay of shadows that the variations of daylight cast on the forms carved into the surface of the marble.
Architecture and artwork in this case are again integrated, despite of the unbridgeable distance which, from the Bauhaus onwards, has sanctioned their progressive and irreversible separation.
That happy union, once broken, has reduced the work of art to a subordinate space, against all of Botta's intentions. However, he continues to ask art to play its autonomous part in enriching the architectural context in which it is placed with value and significance.
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