Casa a Ligornetto 1976

64 pages, italian / english

This book is dedicated to one of Mario Botta’s first masterpieces, the single-family house in Ligornetto, built in the mid-1970s, with few resources but a great construction know-how, for two young Ticino clients. The young architect, then in his early thirties, makes a spartan use of form, reducing the volume to a parallelepiped with a large loggia facing the village, turning a vernacular architecture widespread in the area into a modern form. He then uses ‘poor’ materials, which he ennobles by resorting to colour, as was the custom in peasant homes. In the distribution of interior spaces, the reference is instead to the more modern solutions adopted by the masters of the Modern Movement. The result is an artefact that still amazes today.