Temples for Industrious Lombards: Architecture by Mario Galvagni in Inveruno documents a constellation of singular villas on the Lombard plain — each one a private commission for local industrial families, each one unlike anything built before or since in the region.
About This Book
Between the Ticino river valley and the industrial periphery of Milan lies Inveruno, an unlikely setting for a body of architecture as inventive as Mario Galvagni's. The villas he designed here from the 1960s through the 1980s share certain structural obsessions — suspended shell structures, subterranean living rooms, luminous domes — yet each remains a distinct object in the landscape. This book approaches that architecture through two registers: the visual and the literary. Photographs by Allegra Martin and Francesco Paleari establish the spatial reality of Galvagni's work, while original fiction by Emmanuela Carbé and Paolo Colagrande uses the houses as mise-en-scène. A critical essay by Francesca Olivieri frames the oeuvre as a whole.
Key Features
- 324 pages of documentary photography and original literary fiction set within Galvagni's villas
- Photography by Allegra Martin and Francesco Paleari; critical essay by Francesca Olivieri; texts by Emmanuela Carbé and Paolo Colagrande
- Published by Humboldt Books, ISBN 9791280336255
What You'll Discover
- How Galvagni's villas deploy suspended shell structures and underground rooms as spatial devices that challenge conventional domestic organisation
- The relationship between Lombardy's postwar industrial prosperity and the ambitions of its domestic architecture
- A hybrid editorial method that uses literary fiction to animate built space rather than purely historical or technical analysis
- How luminous domes function as both structural and experiential elements across Galvagni's otherwise varied designs
About the Author
The book is authored collectively by Emmanuela Carbé, Paolo Colagrande, Elisa Di Nofa, Francesca Olivieri, and Francesco Paleari. Carbé and Colagrande contribute original fiction; Olivieri provides the critical essay contextualising Galvagni's practice; Paleari contributes both photography and editorial work alongside Allegra Martin.
Specifications
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 324
- Dimensions: 17 x 21 cm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9791280336255
- Publisher: Humboldt Books
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Architects and historians interested in mid-twentieth-century Italian residential architecture, readers drawn to the intersection of literary writing and built space, and collectors of architecture monographs focused on overlooked regional figures.