After the Morandi bridge collapse killed 43 people in his home city in 2018, Renzo Piano donated the design for its replacement, the Genova San Giorgio bridge, opened in August 2020 with 43 lamps marking the dead.
Architecture & Design
From Renaissance building sites to Milanese product design and contemporary practice.
The stonemason who renamed himself and reshaped the Veneto
Andrea di Pietro della Gondola became Andrea Palladio under a patron’s tutelage, then built farm villas across the Veneto whose 1570 pattern book reached Inigo Jones and Thomas Jefferson.
Ivrea’s typewriter town and the designers who reinvented it
Adriano Olivetti built Ivrea around his typewriter factory, hiring Nizzoli and Sottsass to design objects as considered as its buildings; the town became a UNESCO site in 2018, three decades after Sottsass founded Memphis in Milan.
Gio Ponti and the tower too thin to be a slab
Gio Ponti edited Domus for four decades and, with the engineer Pier Luigi Nervi, gave Milan a tapered 127-metre tower for Pirelli in 1960 that survived a 2002 aircraft strike and remains the city’s most recognisable skyscraper.
How Brunelleschi raised Florence’s dome without a scaffold
For 50 years the crossing of Florence Cathedral stood open to the sky until Filippo Brunelleschi’s herringbone brickwork and sandstone chains let the dome build itself, course by course, from 1420 to 1436.