The Architects’ Journal Architecture News & Buildings
Snozzi spent 35 years primarily working in the Swiss canton of Ticino, in particular with the mayor and local community in the mountain town of Monte Carasso, where he drew up a new urban plan and regulatory framework for its development.
His built work ranged from single family houses to social housing, commercial and public buildings. He also collaborated with other celebrated architects, including Paulo Mendes da Rocha in Brazil and Álvaro Siza in Portugal.
Born in Mendrisio, Ticino, in 1932, Snozzi went onto study at ETH Zurich, opening his own office in Locarno in 1958. Between 1962 to 1971, he worked in association with architect Livio Vacchini and was subsequently appointed professor of architecture at l’École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in 1985.
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During his lengthy academic career he also taught in the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Sassari, Sardinia. In 1993 his work was honoured with the Wakker Prize and the Prince of Wales Prize in urban design.
In 2013 Snozzi took part in Robert Gordon University’s annual Big Crit in Aberdeen. He was interviewed by Penny Lewis and Samuel Penn, the directors of the AE Foundation.
Lewis, now a lecturer lecturer and Wuhan programme lead at the University of Dundee, described Snozzi as a ‘genuinely charming man’ who ‘remained sharp and critical into old age’.
She told the AJ: ‘Although in recent years he’s been heralded as an architect interested in people and place he wasn’t scared of the role of the architect to make bold propositions. I found his work so interesting because it was very far from parochial but entirely site-specific.
‘His work was highly ambitious and often speculative but at the same time he was concerned with the mechanics of building.’
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RIP Luigi Snozzi - What he managed to build is just a fraction of his brilliance.
He was a big inspiration to me so I want to share my favourite parts of his oeuvre.Casa Kalman in Brione, 1973(L)
Casa Walser in Loco, 1988(R) pic.twitter.com/n8dTq1EV3w— Kara Sıçan (The Black Rat) (@architectrader) December 29, 2020
Penn, who has created a book for the AE Foundation which includes the Snozzi interview, added: ‘Snozzi engaged in international projects and competitions until very recently. Each time he worked on a project he tried to reveal a truth, which sometimes meant being critical of client bodies, or the motivations driving a project, often turning established principles on their head to make a point.
‘His critique was sharp and insightful to the end, carrying into the formal as much as it rested in the political, a politics he shared among others with his good friend Paulo Mendes da Rocha. He had no fear. He was a principled and outward-looking individual, a guiding light for those seeking to understand and explain the world, to create in it, even if it sometimes means being marginalised for holding an opposing view.’
One of Snozzi’s most celebrated works was the Kalman House, a sliced and sectioned concrete box on a hillside in Ticino, which he completed in 1976.
In his book 20th-Century Architecture, Jonathan Glancey said Snozzi’s ‘rational yet romantic’ architecture owed ‘as much to Cubism and Le Corbusier as it does to landscape and site’. Of the Kalman House he added: ‘It may be an essay in strict geometry and in the use of a minimal palette of materials and colours, yet this is the point: the theatre of the enfolding landscape provides all the colour and decoration the house and its owners ever need.’
In 2014 Snozzi was handed an RIBA international fellowship.
RIBA international fellowship citation
For Luigi Snozzi architecture is a public issue and a part of the political sphere. For him design is an act of political activism. And, as he says, ‘A design speaks a much clearer language than any manifesto.’
Snozzi is the one of the most important exponents of contemporary architecture in Ticino today. For Snozzi, building is a decidedly public affair. His deep-rooted respect for the historical context of each building site is therefore balanced by a determination that any intervention should be of equally high quality and distinctly modern.
Snozzi’s built work, which includes single family houses, social housing, commercial and public buildings, is characterised by its sensitive and intelligent use of materials. A masterful use of exposed concrete distinguishes most of his work.
Called into the Ticino village of Monte Carasso in 1978 to deliver a simple re-use job involving the conversion of an old convent into a school, Snozzi seized the opportunity to develop a complete new masterplan and road network, which better defined the historic core, created new open spaces and increased densities in the town centre.
This exemplary case has earned world-wide respect for the municipality and at the same time bestowed it with modern architecture of the highest calibre.
The words of the Swiss playwright Max Frisch perhaps best sum up Snozzi’s thinking: ‘Utopia consists in believing that things do not have to be as they are.’
As a Second Year undergrad student at North London Poly I was extremely excited to meet Luigi Snozzi who spent the day with the year group at the invitation of our studio tutor Florian Beigel. He was warm, open and extremely supportive. He taught us about framing views and occupying external space without having to develop a complete sealed envelope. He made the intangible understandable to a 19 year old student studying architecture part-time..Florian was great at getting in really inspiring thinkers; people who perhaps weren’t making the loudest noise – and this was in 1985/86,so there was plenty of pomo noise ‘going on then!. Later when I studied my masters at Brighton Polytechnic, my tutor at the time, the larger than life Professor David Robson took us to see Snozzi’s work in the Ticino. What a complete star. Luigi Snozzi RIP.