Andrea Branzi has died. He was 85 years old and one of the undisputed fathers of Italian design, an internationally renowned architect and artist and recipient of the Compasso d’Oro for his life’s work.
He was a professor at the Polytechnic of Milan. In 1966, Andrea Branzi founded Archizoom Associati together with Massimo Morozzi, Paolo Deganello and Gilberto Corretti. The studio was the hotbed of radical design thinking: This is where the idea of viewing architecture and design as tools for a critical examination of society and its consumer tendencies emerged.
The President Stefano Boeri, the Board of Directors, the General Director Carla Morogallo and the Scientific Committee of the Triennale Milano remember Andrea Branzi, a master of architecture and design who, throughout his career, has linked his history with that of the Triennale on several occasions. There were also numerous contributions to the International Exhibition, most recently the exhibitions Neo Presitoria – 100 verbi and La Metropoli Multietnica on the occasion of the 21st edition in 2016. A year ago on the occasion of the 23rd International Exhibition, Triennale produced and presented the medium-length film Andrea Branzi. Exhibition in prose form that traces the intellectual commitment of a career of some seventy years of a personality who was able to foresee and interpret important social and cultural changes.
“Andrea Branzi has left us. A giant of radical thinking about human spaces – said Boeri – a sophisticated historian of Italian planning, a visionary designer capable of, ironically, inhabiting other universes and parallel worlds. He leaves us a powerful and generative legacy of works and texts – and a film produced by the Triennale a year ago that represents his intellectual testament in every respect. From Wednesday October 11th, at the entrance of the Museum of Italian Design, a tribute to Andrea Branzi will be held by exhibiting a selection of his projects that are part of the Triennale’s permanent collection.” On Friday October 13th, from 6 p.m , it will be a public screening of Andrea Branzi: exhibition in prose form.