1932-2020

In the same Ticino canton of his birth to which he was ever bound, Luigi Snozzi fell prey to Covid-19 on 29 December. A master of contemporary Swiss architecture, Snozzi was born in Mendrisio in 1932 and attended ETH Zurich, after which he launched a career as an architect that led him to Italian neo-rationalism and the maturing of a language of austere lines and raw concrete. In Snozzi these features always went hand in hand with a keen understanding of the reality of his surroundings. This resulted in a constant attention to matters of history and type, but without him succumbing to imitation. Working with his friend and sometimes partner Livio Vacchini and accompanied by contemporaries like Reichlin, Galfetti, and Botta, Snozzi was a leader in the respectful transformation of Italian-speaking Switzerland’s urban and rural landscape in the late 20th century, and leaves a legacy of distilled private homes like the Snider and Kalmann Houses, offices like the Mies-inspired Fabrizia, and exquisite heritage works like the intervention on the Monte Carasso convent.