Luigi Mattioni. Innovare come metodo

Luigi Mattioni (1914-1961) was one of the protagonists of Milan’s post-war reconstruction, in his native city. He graduated with distinction from the Politecnico in 1939 under the supervision of Piero Portaluppi, the favorite architect of the Milanese entrepreneurial bourgeoisie, who, together with Giovanni Muzio, would remain an essential cultural and professional reference for Mattioni. From 1944 he was also engaged in teaching at the same Politecnico. His brief design career, cut short by his death at the age of forty-seven, unfolded over the two decades between 1941 and 1961. Prodigious in both quantity and quality, it ranged from architecture to urban planning, and from interiors to exhibition design. This is borne out by the more than two hundred and fifty projects, documented by photographs, drawings and reports preserved in the archive of his professional practice and now deposited by his heirs with the Archivio Progetti Iuav. The availability of these materials was both the premise and the source of the present multi-authored study, which aims to inaugurate and encourage new critical analyses and historiographical investigations of a figure of twentieth-century Italian architecture who has still not been adequately recognized.