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Over the past decade Mario Botta has focused his prolific creativity on a series of public “events” of great significance, in locations far and wide - from Japan to Bolivia, from Tel Aviv to the Swiss Canton of Ticino - and addressing dissimilar functions.
Present throughout the Swiss architect’s reflection, the theme of the public building has led him to undertake a series of architectural works where symbols and planning options operate on several levels, resulting in designs that are both original and closely linked to the surroundings and their specific background. These eleven public buildings, erected between the early Nineties and today, are a statement of his artistic conception as well as of the evolution of his constant research over the years, where the expert practise of geometry, the overseeing of the construction work and materials, and a subtle interpretation of the “immanent” values of architecture itself, exemplify a new phase of Botta’s architecture.
In this volume, conceived as a real “artist’s book“ Pino Musi’s colour and black-and-white images and the pictures of the superb wooden models provide a refined illustration of all eleven works. Essays by Werner Oechslin, Cesare De Seta, Benedetto Gravagnuolo, Gabriele Cappellato and Botta himself form an introduction to the precise representation of the works, that include the new synagogue in Tel Aviv, a monument for La Paz, the Tinguely Museum in Basle, an art Gallery in Tokyo, the San Francisco MOCA, the cathedral of Evry, the church of San Giovanni at Mogno, the two parish churches of Pordenone and Sartirana di Merate, as well as the mobile theatre for the celebration of the nine-hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Swiss Federation.