Andrea Branzi, the Italian architect, designer, educator and thinker has died in Milan. Branzi trained as an architect at the Florence School of Architecture, receiving his degree in 1966. He then founded Archizoom Associati with Gilberto Corretti, Paolo Deganello, Massimo Morozzi, an experimental design group known for its groundbreaking projects including the visionary No-Stop-City, an unbuilt project presenting an urban utopia where the architectural form disappears and only the essential remains.
Branzi was also an educator who co-founded the Domus Academy post-graduate school of design in Milan in 1982. He was then the chairman of the School of Interior Design at the Polytechnic University of Milan until 2009. His ideas on theoretical architecture remain influential: ‘Today, in order to create a new architecture and new urban spaces, it is necessary to begin further upstream: one has to plunge one’s hands into that vast planktonic soup of products, technologies, pictures, signs, and data which make up the artificial universe in which man is completely immersed.’
Branzi’s practice also included practical design objects, such as chairs and other furniture. His designs are part of the collections of important museums around the world, such as the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the V&A in London; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Houston; and MoMA, New York. He also had several exhibitions at Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi in Berlin. Branzi won the Italian Architecture Prize’s lifetime achievement award in 2022.
