1927-2020

Having contracted the coronavirus, the 92-year-old Vittorio Gregotti succumbed to it on 15 March. He was one of Italy’s most recognized architects and a theorist of importance much followed and admired in Spain during the years of postmodernity. Graduating from the Politecnico di Milano in 1962, Gregotti soon came in touch with the critical group organized around Ernesto N. Rogers and the magazine Casabella – of which he was editor-in-chief from 1982 to 1996 – and became a militant organicist, eventually leading the sector, hand in hand with Aldo Rossi, that tied the architectural project to history and wanted to prioritize the city and the territory over the idea of buildings as objects. Gregotti remained faithful to his territorial, topographic, and civic vision of the profession in the course of a long career that saw him raise about twenty buildings, all of them recognizable and engagé if not always perfectly apt, from the Bicocca district of Milan to the Belém Cultural Center in Lisbon and, in Spain, the Montjuïc Olympic Stadium in Barcelona, where he worked with Federico Correa, Alfons Milà, Joan Margarit, and Carles Buxadé.