Masters and Pupils Lecture Series | Politecnico di Milano | Lecture 2 | Marco Zanuso

Marco Zanuso: Landscape, Architecture and Design
Prof. Luciano Crespi | Professor of Design
It was Gio Ponti who described him as "the most reckless of architects" in 1952 when discussing his design for a house in Via Gorizia, the façade of which features fulget panels with abstract drawings by the painter Gianni Dova. Zanuso was not yet forty years old at the time. Still, he already had the hallmarks of a brilliant experimenter, able to measure himself against the complexity and evolution of the world of design and its "production techniques" and, at the same time, practice collaboration between architects and artists.
Zanuso explores, in advance, themes that are today considered strategic. Particularly that of the relationship between architecture and landscape addressed in a 1962 challenging essay and to which it is necessary to return. Although his fame, even on an international level, is due above all to his works in the field of industrial product design and the use of complex methods in the management of architectural projects, in the last twenty years the most attentive critics have finally highlighted his greatness as a cultured and innovative architect, endowed with a non-dogmatic vision of the problems he was called upon to tackle, with traits of uniqueness in the panorama of figures who worked in the second half of the 20th century.