Umberto Riva

192 pages, Italian/English

In his long career, Umberto Riva (1928-2021), one of the most original Italian architects of the last decades, has developed a personal approach to design, understood as a fundamental part of a broader research that connects painting and architecture, interiors and objects. Lamps, furniture, carpets and graphic design resonate with paintings, installations, buildings, public spaces and domestic interiors, reworking traditional and industrial materials. To retrace this complex artistic exploration, the volume presents Riva’s work in the field of design through sketches, drawings, photographs and other documents from the architect’s archive - many of them unpublished. The result is a mosaic of references, dialogues and artistic connections that give proof of his design experimentation, moved by a restlessness that results in geometric, chromatic and spatial exceptions.