A journey through the most significant villas built in Italy by famous architects, starting from the post-war period. Over twenty works illustrated with drawings and photographs.
The villa typology constitutes one of the architect’s privileged fields of activity. The masters of contemporary architecture have confirmed this vocation: in fact they have made it the test-bed for some of their boldest experiments. Developments in the immediate post-war period, the crisis of the Modernist orthodoxy, the quest for continuity with tradition, variously interpreted, rather than the choice of an absolutely innovative vocabulary can be retraced, or even anticipated in the villas reviewed here. Ignazio Gardella, Luigi Moretti, BBPR and Carlo Scarpa are among the protagonists of the volume, as well as of the architectural debate in the period. The are backed up by less well-known but no less significant names, with works by Mario De Renzi, Ugo Luccichenti, Leonardo Ricci, Bruno Morassutti and Luigi Vietti. Again in recent years villas built in Italy by contemporary architects such as Herzog & de Meuron, Tadao Ando, Mario Botta, Werner Tscholl and Vincenzo Melluso, have contributed to foster the exercise of the projectual understanding of a theme which is always alive, that of the detached house.