This volume brings together some “traces” of the foundation and growth of the Accademia di Mendrisio, a school of architecture established in 1996 as a faculty of the University of Italian Switzerland, based on a project by the architect Mario Botta. The author relates his own vision of architecture understood as a generational commitment in the face of environmental transformations.

The training of architects is structured into three groups of skills: history and culture, science and technology, design. The purpose is to achieve a triple ecology that is simultaneously environmental, urban and human. The educational system envisages the involvement of disciplines apparently distant from the problems of architecture , in which historians, philosophers and scientists, together with architects and urban planners, question the conditions for being human today on Earth. In depicting the ideal profile of the architect educated at Mendrisio, the qualities that emerge are the drive and the design intelligence of this institution, which in just twenty-five years since it was founded has already become prestigious.
Since the very beginning, major figures with an international reputation have been involved. They include, no name only a few, Carlo Bertelli, Francesco Dal Co, Sergio Albeverio, Aurelio Muttoni, Peter Zumthor, Bruno Monguzzi and Gabriele Basilico. Botta retraces and examines the reasons and the successes of the hundreds of partnerships with architects, artists, photographers and intellectuals (including Rafael Moneo, Tadao Ando, Mimmo Paladino and Oliviero Toscani) who in over twenty years of activity have done their part to make the Academy one of the outstanding schools of architecture on the international scene.