Piero Bottoni’s colorful city: theory, design and building

the way to his professional maturity he pursued a personal concept of urban space in which the colorful fronts enhanced the plastic nature of the architecture. This attention is already manifest in the early notebooks from his university days. It was then confirmed with the exposition of 6 original watercolour paints at the 3rd Triennale of Monza in 1927. With the "Cromatismi architettonici" he presented his colour concept and developed a special relationship between the colour and the urban space. He experimented with the integration of the shape and the colour on the street sides. The tectonic shades on the building fronts shape the urban space with a gradual clearing upward. This solution, inspired by Leonardo’s aerial perspective, showed a "constructive" concept of colour, close to the avant-garde of the time. The assets of Bottoni’s Archive testify the reoccurring presence of peculiar characters in his colour concept, confirmed by the comparison between the theoretical writings, the experimentation and the building: thirty years later he will use the same colour pattern for the project for the City Hall of Sesto San Giovanni (1961-71).