-Showcases Mario Botta's portfolio of projects and contemporary design
talents in stunning full-colour photography, with detailed plans and
drawings and comprehensive profile descriptions -Celebrates almost 40
works of this prolific architect, and is a superb compendium to IMAGES'
highly successful Leading Architects Series -Profiles the insight into
the influences of this firm and its practice, while capturing its vision
for the future of design, emerging trends and influences that shapes its
work We recognize Mario Botta's buildings for their strong presence. His
architecture is not ephemeral. It shapes the mass firmly and precisely.
It touches the ground with self-reliance. A building by Mario Botta is
an autonomous object. It comprises an ordered world of its own make. It
is standing in dialogue with the urban tissue, but it establishes its
own order as if it aims at differentiation instead of integration.
Architectural order represents the core of his personal idiom. It is a
well structured, compositional order which organises everything into a
whole, as an underlying thread that connects and brings together houses
on the mountains to museums and churches, banks and commercial buildings
to buildings on the ground and buildings underground, different
buildings at different places in time. The themes that underlie Mario
Botta's architecture are ties that connect and spines that support,
common threads that bind one building to the next. His architecture is
one of mass. It is then of no surprise that mass is the first thing to
be defined and ordered, in his creative process. The volume of his
buildings is mostly composed by one or more primary solids. Volume is
thus an a-priori for Botta. It is conceived beforehand, the starting
point to the adventure of architectural design.
