(1925-2000)

The Turin Architect Roberto Gabetti – who with his partner Aimaro Isola, and from a silent and peripheral position, he took part in the debate of postwar Italian architecture – passed away soon after turning 75. Attached to the Neoliberty movement that emerged in Italy in the fifties, this Turin-based office advocated a return to constructive concerns, a revived interest in material and detail, and a recuperation of regional and local traditions as a response to the expressive limitations and disdain for history that the Modern Movement seemed to support. With the Bottega di Erasmo, published in Casabella in 1957, the work of these at the time young architects triggered a heated controversy between the editor of this magazine, Ernesto Nathan Rogers, and that of the The Architectural Review, Reyner Banham, about the degree of formal involution implicit in neoliberty. With projects like the equestrian society of Turin, the Olivetti residential center in Ivrea, and the town hall of Bagnolo Piemonte, his career for decades took on a certain eclecticism that only serves to stress his uniqueness in the contemporary Italian scene.