LA SCALA 097
more. To someone as experienced as Botta, it might as well be ‘and for my next trick: La Scala Milan’ because the work of his firm really is a bag of tricks. And they are all brilliant, the more you look the more you see the man really is a magician. And having come in for so much criticism the first time around in 2004, it really has been magical the way Botta’s completion of his project at La Scala really works. Born in the Ticino, the Italian-speaking canton of Switzerland, Botta dropped out of secondary school and after an apprenticeship in Lugano he went to Venice to study architecture where he met, among others, Carlo Scarpa, Louis Kahn and Le Corbusier. He
Previous page The musical director is said to be very pleased with the acoustics
Right Andrijashenko and Manni. Not only the stage, but the entire backstage was rebuilt
Below, right Andrijashenko with Vittoria Valerio
even went to work with both Corbusier and Kahn for a while. He started his own firm in Lugano in 1970, and welcomed success early with some remarkable individual family homes designed over the next decade. In 2011, he moved his office to his home town of Mendrisio on the frontier between Italy and Switzerland. Nearer to Como than it is to Lugano, it is perhaps not surprising that in over a half a century’s existence the firm has undertaken so much work in Italy.
Milan may be a bit grey, tough, a bit ugly perhaps, but it has always been a byword for forward-thinking building – from the neoclassical glories of the world’s first shopping
mall to modernist masterpieces galore, it has never stagnated architecturally; a scintillating mix of the medieval and the modern, culture and commerce, its architecture is a combination of the ornate, indulgent, austere, sugary-sweet icing gothic and fascist-classical imperial nostalgia. Arguably still one of the world’s capitals of design, this is where design is not a thing but a way of doing things – the culture of design is critical to its identity. And there are wonderful buildings by Stefano Boeri, Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, Arata Isozaki, Herzog & de Meuron, and OMA to admire. Botta is probably the best of them. He has the last laugh.
ALL IMAGES: BRESCIA/AMISANO © TEATRO ALLA SCALA
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133
