(1923-2003)

The table clocks and indicator screens ‘Cifra 3”, the characteristic calendar-page movement of which presides the atmosphere of stations and airports, talk about Gino Valle, the Italian designer and architect born in Udine, whose career as a painter was thwarted when he was sent to a work camp in Germany after deserting the marine during the Second World War. Upon his return to Italy crossing the Alps by foot, he studied in Venice with Scarpa and later in the United States with Gropius. Established in his home town, he combined his work as professor in Venice with a career linked to the large Italian industrial firms like Olivetti and Zanussi, for which he designed respectively an office building in Ivrea al Borgo and a data center in Pordenone, aside from furniture and electrical appliances. Kenneth Frampton considers Gino Valle to be one of the representatives of the postwar critical regionalism that reviewed the foundations of modernity from local context. The memorial to the victims of the Brescia attack (1975) is one of his most famous works; and his last project, that he will not see completed, was the theater of Vicenza.