Architecture

Attilio Terragni was born in Como in 1960.

After a short apprenticeship in Studio Terragni in Como and at Studio Eisenman New York, he participates as associate designer with Daniel Libeskind in the competition for the Berlin Museum and the City Gates Masterplan for the Dutch city of Groningen; these projects are among the first examples of international relevance in the application of the new architectonic approach in which space emerges out of the use of diagrams of numberless lines and graphic textures, developed through the computer, to overcome the paradigm of orthogonality and the 90° angle.

 The interest in architecture as a multidisciplinary form of art, derived from the crescent progress in the world of information technology, was then consolidated though his didactic activity at Lopsia  (Laboratory of Primary Studies in Architecture) in Brye (France) and in the designs developed between 1991-1993, including the masterplan for the reconstruction of the Souks of Beirut and the SPT urban block in Como. These design, published by Architectural Design Magazine in the issue “After Geometry”, presented for the first time to the wide international public,  works of Italian designers related to the diagrams and graphic textures in Architecture.

It was the theoretical experimentation of this period that fueled the winning design of the international competition of Federation Square in Melbourne, Australia: for the first time the whole process of creation and construction of public institutions of large complexity was not only successfully carried out and verified starting from the multidisciplinarity of a graphic diagram, but also had led to the building of a whole urban block of 50.000 sqm of usable space.

In the same years Attilio Terragni has started to introduce in his practice in Italy this new diagrammatic and multidisciplinary approaches with designs and realizations, such as the new office and laboratory spaces for the Experimental Institute for Silk and Paper in Milan and the Sarpi multifunctional space, both in Milan.

These works have been sided by the theoretic research on new geometries with the monographic publication on Libeskind entitled “Beyond the walls”, in his didactic activity at the Politecnico di Milano and in the design initiatives Cities and territories – series of events for the rediscovery of the contemporary city in which architecture becomes the occasion for the encounter between multiple forms of art.

In 1998, Attilio Terragni was one of the founding members of the Centro Studi Giuseppe Terragni, organizing research and publications on architecture of the ’20 and 30’ in cooperation with important institutions, including the Central Archive of the State and the Centro Studi Andrea Palladio. The conferences on Italian Architecture and the exhibitions organized during these research works, have culminated in his appointment in 2004 as president of the National Committee for the Celebrations of Giuseppe Terragni, whose program now constitutes a prototype for such ministerial initiatives. The organization saw a whole year of events, exhibitions, conventions, lectures and publications in which architecture was put in dialogue with  all main forms of art, involving personalities from all over the world and realizing more than six different publications, including an Atlas in Italian and English.

Recent project saw the opening of the Memorial “ Memory and Light” to the Victims of September 11th, in Padova; a convention center and two housing projects are under construction in Milan; he is currently participating in the definitive design phase for the ex Fiera in the Center of Milan.