Concept
Ignazio Gardella (30 March 1905 in Milan, Lombardy – 16 March 1999) was an Italian architect and designer. Born into a family of architects, the first of whom was his namesake Ignazio Gardella Sr. (1803–1867). Gardella graduated in engineering from the Politecnico di Milano university in 1928, and later earned a degree in architecture from the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia (IUAV) in 1949. In his university years he came into contact with other young protagonists of the Milanese scene together with whom he took part in the creation of the Italian Modern Movement. His long professional activity, which began before his graduation at the end of the 1920s with his father Arnaldo Gardella (1873–1928), produced an enormous quantity of projects and realizations. In the same years he was a leader of important cultural events, like CIAM (in 1952 he founded, with others, the summer session in Venice; in 1959 he participated in CIAM X in Otterlo in the Netherlands), or the first INU conferences (starting in 1949). The figure of Gardella remained at the pinnacle of Italian architecture for all of the 1960s and '70s, with intense professional activity whose importance is proven by his presence in international publications. In the last phase of his life, Gardella, now among the eminences grises of Italian architecture, still produced significant projects, like the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Genova (1975–1989), which brought him once more to the front lines of the architectural debate. Gardella's activity has had a determining role in the field of design as well, starting as early as 1947, when he founded the Azucena Agency with Luigi Caccia Dominioni, the first that inaugurated Italian design production of high quality. Gardella designed primarily decorative furniture objects. If one looks for Ignazio Gardella's style, one is likely to be disoriented. His projects, over the years, changed according to changing architectural tendencies, often anticipating them, but always containing elements that diverged from the current with which they might be associated.
