Gabriele Neri

Umberto Riva (born in Milan, 1928) is one of the last exponents of a generation that both invented modern architecture and challenged it. After graduating in 1959 at the IUAV in Venice (a school where the faculty at the time included great masters like Carlo Scarpa, Franco Albini, Bruno Zevi, Ignazio Gardella and Giancarlo De Carlo), Riva gained acclaim in the following decades thanks to projects of all kinds, which earned him numerous awards including the Gold Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Italian Architecture. This monograph analyzes his work in the fields of interior and exhibition design, examined for the first time in a comprehensive and chronologically extensive form thanks to in-depth research in the archives of Umberto Riva. In his domestic spaces in dialogue with Mediterranean nature, the exhibitions he set up at the Milan Triennale and the Palladio Museum in Vicenza, in his urban apartments and reinterpretation of the architecture and work of his mentors, the restless and radical character of his architectural approach emerges: a design philosophy in which the search for form implies more intimate reflections on living.