Mario Botta

Architect, Switzerland
Mario Botta gained architectural fame during the early 1970s when he began
designing small houses in the Ticino region of Switzerland.
Botta completed an apprenticeship with Tita Carloni and architectural studies in Milan
and Venice, prior to opening his own office in 1969. The houses he designed during the
early 1970s established the Ticino school and changed Swiss architec-ture dramatically.
It is largely because of Botta’s innovative work that the present generation of Swiss
architects is internationally acclaimed.
During the 1970s and early 1980s, the Ticino region changed from a primarily
agricultural economy, to an industrial one that emphasizes tourism. The primary cause of
this change was the integration of this region into the European highway system at the
beginning of the 1960s. Most of the Ticino architects built for the wealthy bourgeoisie
who profited from the economic change, and Botta’s first commissions came either from
clients to whom he was recommended by his mentor Carloni, or from his relatives. In
addition, he participated in competitions, either alone or with older colleagues, such as
Luigi Snozzi, Carloni, and Aurelio Galfetti.
The Ticino school generates its designs from architectural and contextual
requirements. Architecturally, the buildings exhibit their materials and construction
openly. Simple forms characterize typical examples, with a focus on mass and contour
line, and ornamentation derived from structure and construction technology.
Contextually, these designs attempt to relate the old to the new. The old comes from
architectural typology and the vernacular traditions, and the new stems from building
technology. In addition, these architects intend to express a mythical topography of the
Ticino region, or what is termed the natural calling of the site. This architecture attempts
to continue the trends (tendenza) already apparent in the organization of the land, and to realize
them in an architecture conceived as an act of culture, which incorporates geometry and
history.
For Botta, the dignity of architecture results not from intuition, but from architecture’s
own rules and from history. He proposes that history is the place where architecture finds
and defines its meaning. Form and meaning are determined through the relationship to
historical buildings, especially the local Romanesque and baroque churches. New
meanings can be derived only from these familiar themes, and it is only secondarily that
Entries A–F 295
meaning is created through sociocultural usage. Botta’s designs aim to contrast physical,
social, and cultural traditions to the transient phenomena of modern life.
Botta began in the 1960s, with designs that were inspired by the postwar
work of his idols: Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn. During the 1970s, he
transformed his theories into buildings that had a strong formal quality.
The Bianchi House (1973) in Riva San Vitale is a mysterious, isolated
tower that stands up to the surrounding mountains. It is defined by corner
supports and a roof slab, and allows outside views by increasing the
opening of the construction shell as it rises. The confrontational position
of the house to its site emerges in the entrance bridge, which articulates the detachment between natural and man-made, resulting in stark, bizarre
forms.
Botta’s buildings impress through their strong image quality, which might be
interpreted as cultural resistance intent on a new order and meaning. The houses are
devoid of clustered compositions or extensions. The massive exterior walls establish a
sharp datum. Through such devices, the Casa Rotonda (1981) in Stabio establishes an
unexpected presence within an anonymous context. The building is derived from
geometric form. The seemingly impenetrable, cylindrical shape contrasts with the large
cuts in its surface and suggests an opposition between fortification and openness. The
Casa Rotonda questions our assumptions concerning the nature of dwellings;
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 296
conventional or traditional elements are eliminated. Moreover, everything is subordinated
to form. The interior is laid out symmetrically around the central slot of the stairwell and
skylight, and rooms are irregular, leftover spaces resulting from inserting a rectangular
grid into the house’s cylinder.
In larger designs, the geometrical forms became megastructures. The Middle School
(1977) in Morbio Inferiore, uses a bridge typology for the arrangement of its eight
classroom clusters. The complex is an orderly architectural composition with openings,
covered areas, porticoes, and passages. Modular units are repeated to generate the overall
shape, and to make the organizational structure of the building easily apparent. A
spatially diverse, skylit central passage creates a rich variety of spaces inside this simple
form.
In the State Bank (1982) in Fribourg, Botta managed to fit his building into an existing
urban situation. A protruding cylindrical volume dominates a public square, and turns the
corner while the two receding wings relate to the rhythm and scale of the buildings on the
flanking streets. Botta used this approach of dividing a large building into different
shapes and facade articulations frequently during the 1980s.
In the late 1980s, the images of the facades became dominant in Botta’s buildings;
they became figures in which typical details from his earlier designs were re-used. In his
Union Bank (1995) in Basel, the facade, curved toward the square, impresses as a heavy
bastion. It opens into a cavity that is partly filled by a massive pier on a broad base.
Although such shapes are appropriate for a bank building, they become disturbing when
used for other building types. The large cubical forms used for the Housing Complex
(1982) in Novazzano appear to be without scale and meaningless, because they are not
finished in Botta’s traditional brick veneer. The absence of this craft surface reveals the
emptiness of these forms.
A disappointing aspect of Botta’s architecture is that most of his buildings seem to
embody the same vision. Now, his repetitive cylinders have appeared in all parts of the
world for the most diverse functions, such as museums, churches, single-family homes,
shopping centers, and office buildings, as well as in his furniture designs and household
appliances.