Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani (born 1951, in Rome, Italy) is an architect, architectural theorist and architectural historian as well as a professor emeritus for the History of Urban Design at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich). He practices and promotes a formally disciplined, timelessly classic, and aesthetically sustainable form of architecture, one without modernist or postmodernist extravagances. As an author and editor of several acclaimed works of architectural history and theory, his ideas are widely cited.
Academic education Lampugnani attended the Swiss primary school in Rome, then the German grammar school in Rome. From 1970 to 1973, he studied architecture at the University La Sapienza in Rome as well as at the University of Stuttgart. Lampugnani graduated in 1973 and completed his doctorate at the University of Stuttgart in 1977. In 1983, he acquired the Dottore in Architettura at the University of Rome.
Teaching and research Between the years of 1974 to 1980, Lampugnani was a research assistant at the Institute for Principles of Modern Architecture at the University of Stuttgart at the chair of Jürgen Joedicke. From 1981 to 1982, he was awarded a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) scholarship under the Berlin program of artistic exchanges. Following from 1981 to 1983, Lampugnani also held a research fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies at Columbia University in New York. In 1983, he was appointed professor at the International Summer School of Fine Arts in Salzburg. From 1984 to 1985, he was a visiting professor at the Department of Architecture, at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. From 1985 to 1986, he was a fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study. In 1990, Lampugnani was appointed professor to the State University of Fine Arts (Städelschule) in Frankfurt am Main. From 1994 to 2016, he was a full professor for the History of Urban Design at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich). From 1998 to 2001, Lampugnani was appointed dean of the Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich, after which he was the vice-dean of the faculty (2001–2003). From 2005 to 2007, he was appointed dean of the Network City and Landscape (NSL) at ETH Zurich. In the years between 2002 and 2007, Lampugnani founded and directed the postgraduate program «Urban Forms. Conditions and Consequences». From 2007 to 2010, he was the director of the working group «Spatial Sciences in the ETH Domain». Since 2008, he was deputy dean, two years later in 2010, he was appointed dean of the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta). During his tenure at ETH Zurich, Lampugnani has given numerous international lectures as well as held visiting professorships at institutions including: Harvard University, Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura at the University of Navarra in Pamplona, and the Faculty of Architecture at the Politecnico in Milan. Lampugnani developed his own architectural approach in the circles of Vittorio Gregotti, Aldo Rossi and especially Giorgio Grassi, but also Oswald Mathias Ungers and Josef Paul Kleihues. As a consultant and theoretical brain of the Internationale Bauaustellung (International Architecture Exhibition, IBA) for new buildings he was able to implement his architectural convictions in the 1980s. A decade later he was one of the protagonists of the Berliner Architekturstreit, which was started over the guiding principles of the new buildings of the inner city of Berlin after the German reunification. He propagates a formally disciplined, timelessly classic and also aesthetically sustainable architecture without modernist or postmodernist extravagances.
Architectural work Lampugnani opened his first architectural practice first in Berlin in 1980, later in Milan (Studio di Architettura) and in Zurich (Baukontor Architekten, with partner Jens Bohm). Among his most important projects:
2015 commercial building at Schiffbauplatz in Zurich, with Jens Bohm 2014 parking garage in East Hanover, New Jersey 2008 underground railway station Mergellina in Naples 2008 office building at the Fabrikstrasse 12 on the Novartis Campus in Basel 2007 master plan of the Richti complex in Wallisellen as well as planning of the open spaces and residential building Konradhof, with Jens Bohm 2004 reshaping of the Danube banks in Regensburg (2004ff), with Wolfgang Weinzierl and others 2001 urban design master plan of the Novartis Campus in St. Johann, Basel (2001ff) 2001 entrance square of the Audi factory in Ingolstadt (1999–2001), with Wolfgang Weinzierl 1999 housing group in Maria Lankowitz (Steiermark), with Marlene Dörrie und Michael Regner 1996 office building in Block 109 in Berlin, with Marlene Dörrie These and other projects have been published in various monographs (Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani, Urban Architectures, Quart Verlag, 2006; Urban Design as Craft, gta Verlag, 2011) and in the most significant architecture magazines, amongst them Casabella, Domus and Lotus international, Milan, Arquitectura Viva, Madrid, and AMC (Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité), Paris. He was member of various juries for architecture competitions and prizes, among them the Praemium Imperiale, Tokyo (consultant); the Mies van der Rohe Award for European Architecture, Barcelona (chairman) and the Green Prize for Urban Planning, Harvard University.
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
