Italo Rota

Italo Rota (1953-2024) was a famous Italian architect. A great collector of books and magazines, Rota was a humanist architect, also capable of daring with bold and experimental creations that were able to amaze and involve the visitor, risking, if necessary, to touch the limits of kitsch. The great cities of his life were Milan and Paris: in the first he was born and educated, studying first at the Polytechnic and then working in the studios of Franco Albini and Vittorio Gregotti, in the second he found full professional affirmation assisting Gae Aulenti in the design of the Musée d’Orsay and in the interior design of the Centre Pompidou. Returning to Milan after a decade in France, he held the role of Councilor for Urban Quality with the council of Marco Formentini in the early 1990s and signed the project for a new large city museum, the Museo del Novecento (completed in 2010), located in the Arengario which directly overlooks Piazza Duomo. His relationship with the world of fashion was also very fruitful, especially with the designer Roberto Cavalli, for whom he designed a villa in Tuscany and several boutiques around the world. However, his specialization was above all in special installations, a category to which one of his latest great works also belongs, the Italian pavilion at the 2020 Dubai Expo, co-designed with Carlo Ratti. Less well-known are his forays into the field of product design, including collaborations with brands such as Driade, Artemide and Meritalia.