Gio Ponti & Giulio Minoletti Biography
Giulio Minoletti (1910 - 1981) was born in 1910 in Milan, a city in which he lived almost without interruption and to which he dedicated most of his work as an architect, urban planner and designer. Minoletti's work, vast and complex, ranges from the urban dimension to design, including the design of public and private buildings, installations, interior arrangements, furniture design, studies on building industrialization and the prefabricated house, urban planning, analysis of road systems, beyond the famous series of "moving architecture". Not yet graduated, he presented a "project for a villa on a hill" at the IV Triennale, up until the last projects of the late seventies. Having graduated in 1931 from the Higher School of Architecture of the Polytechnic of Milan, he carried out teaching activities there from 1933 to 1949. According to a rather widespread practice of the time, he often worked alongside other architects, engineers and artists (among whom we remember Lucio Fontana, Antonia Tomasini, Enrico Ciuti). Minoletti took an active part in the debate on the great themes of his time, interpreting the most cutting-edge trends and participating in the main collective occasions, suffice it to remember "Milano Verde", a proposal for a master plan for the Sempione-Fiera area of Milan, drawn up with Albini, Gardella, Pagano, Palanti, Predaval, Romano. The proposal for a residential neighborhood with a "green river" urban plan dates back to 1948, with Gio Ponti, in the area of the former Sempione railway yard. He also took part in the study commissions for the new Milan plan (1948-1953), and also expressed his positions through the pages of important newspapers, underlining above all the need for a collective commitment and "a legal master plan". Particularly significant was his membership of the Movimento Studi Architettura (MSA), of which he was president between 1953 and 1955, and of the Lombard section of the National Urban Planning Institute.
