(1910-2002)

Founder of the International Union of Architects (UIA), Pierre Vago died on 27 January at the age of 92 in his house on the outskirts of Paris. The French architect of Hungarian descent was also a successful writer, editor, and critic. Son of the architect Joseph Vago, Pierre was born in Budapest in 1910. He moved to Rome with his family where he would remain until 1928, when he left for Paris to begin his studies at the École Speciale under the tutorship of August Perret. With a career that runs parallel to the past century, his work and his Intense Life, title he gave to his memoirs, made Vago an emblematic architect of the 1930s. At the early age of twenty he joined the magazine L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui where he worked as editor between 1933 to 1939. In his relentless denial of modern dogmatism, represented, in his view, by the figure of Le Corbusier, Vago founded in 1932 a series of international meetings to counteract the exclusive character of the CIAM. A close observer of the Modern Movement, Vago shall also be remembered for carrying out an important reform of the profession’s organization.