Mario Botta 
Total Projects from Mario Botta: 4
Mario Botta s career has straddled the two most powerful generations of twentieth-century architecture. Born in Ticino, Switzerland, in 1943, he has a CV to die for. A pupil of prominent theorist Tita Carloni, he worked for both Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn during their time in Venice in the 1960s. He also studied under Carlo Scarpa while at the Venice architecture school, and found himself in an ideal position to assimilate into the strongly region-alist tendencies of Ticino a host of international influences, particularly drawing on the Italian Neo-Rationalism of Aldo Rossi and Vittorio Gregotti.Botta s early work was quite extraordinary. His iconic house at Riva San Vítale (1973) is a concrete and brick tower in a spectacular setting, referring to the vernacular tradition of "rocoli" summer houses in the region as well as serving as a marker in the landscape - an important aspect of much of Botta s work. The house looks both monumental and hermetic and openings in the fabric of the building are chosen to coincide with choice views of the landscape.
His first public buildings were heavily influenced by Kahn s work in Venice and had a strong attitude to the urban realm. His design for Zurich Central Station (1978), made in collaboration with his close contemporary Luigi Snozzi, proposed a bridge over the railway tracks - described by critic Kenneth Frampton as a "viaduct megastructure" - linking two areas of the city with an elevated, tree-lined route, and providing restaurants, shops, offices and parking.
Botta is perhaps now best known for the strong stylistic features of his buildings - striated materials (most often brickwork), and the drum form that has recurred throughout his work, from his Casa Rotonda in Stabio, Switzerland (1982), to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1995). SFMOMA s geometric forms step back in a kind of ziggurat with a truncated cylinder rising through the middle. The subtlety with which Botta manipulates natural light in this building had critics in paroxysms of delight and brought comparisons with his old mentor Kahn. It is perhaps more strongly symmetrical and referential than Kahn s work, though, with all of Botta s classical influences on show.
Perhaps the most delightful of his buildings is the most anomalous: in 1999, Botta designed a 33-metre-high, full-scale model of Borromini s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane church in Rome. The model was assembled from 35,000 wooden planks held together by steel cables and fixed to a steel frame. This strange apparition was placed on a raft in the lake at Lugano, Switzerland, to commemorate the four-hundredth anniversary of Borromini s birth, also forming a job creation scheme for the unemployed. Screaming out for interpretation as a defining piece of Postmodernism, the project is stunningly beautiful as an object and perhaps should be left at that.
Botta, whose career began as an apprentice when he was fifteen, is still relatively young, and is an important figure already. There are signs that his work is returning home, with low-key projects such as a winery in eastern Italy, and it will be interesting to see whether this powerful stylist can make his architecture relevant to the post-minimalist generation.
website: www.botta.ch
Featured Projects
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National Insurance Headquarters
Address: 103-105 Syngrou Avenue, 117 45 , ATHENS - Greece Architect: Mario Botta | Sparch | Sakellaridou / Papanikolaou Architects | Maria Pollani Category: Office |
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New NBG Headquarters
Address: 6 Aiolou Str., 102 32 , ATHENS - Greece Architect: Mario Botta | Sparch | Sakellaridou / Papanikolaou Architects | Maria Pollani Category: Office | Office |
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SFMOMA
Address: 151 Third Street (between Mission and Howard Streets) , SAN FRANCISCO-CALIFORNIA - United States Architect: Mario Botta Category: Cultural | Museums |
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Watari Museum of Contemporary Art
Address: 3-7-6 Jingumae, Shibuya-ku , TOKYO - Japan Architect: Mario Botta Category: Cultural | Museums |
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