Gino Levi Montalcini Biography
Luigi Levi was born in Milan on 21 April 1902 to Adamo (1867-1932), an engineer from Turin, and the painter Adele Montalcini (1879-1963). Like her sisters Rita, researcher, and Paola, painter, she will take the surname Levi Montalcini. In Turin he completed his studies at the Massimo D'Azeglio classical high school. Very early he followed private drawing and sculpture courses. He graduated from the Royal Engineering School of Turin in 1925. In Turin, between the twenties and thirties, he frequented a vast circle of intellectuals and artists which included architects, painters and art critics, including Giuseppe Pagano, Edoardo Persico , Felice Casorati, Gigi Chessa, Enrico Paulucci, Umberto Cuzzi, Domenico Soldiero Morelli, Mario Passanti, Carlo Mollino. In particular, the meeting with Giuseppe Pagano, six years older but a fellow student, marked the beginning of his career as an architect, with projects that placed him among the first and most representative exponents of the rationalist movement in Italy. The office building designed for Gualino immediately resonated internationally. Other important projects followed by the two architects, widely publicized and analyzed by critics, in particular through the pages of Casabella and Domus. In the period between the two wars, after the separation from Pagano, who moved to Milan, he remained faithful to the modern orientation, even in years, especially after 1935, of involution of city and national culture and politics. Among the most significant works of this period is the heliotherapy colony of Bardonecchia. He was hit by the racial laws in 1938. In 1943 he married Maria Gattone; in 1944 their son Emanuele was born from the union, in 1946 Piera. From 1943 to 1945 he was displaced to Florence, where he fortunately managed to escape racial persecution under a false name. Having returned to Turin, starting from 1946 he took an active part in the formation of the Giuseppe Pagano Group and the local headquarters of the APAO, contributing to the discussion that engaged architects in those years on the themes of reconstruction and the new tasks of architecture. The 1950s saw him involved in numerous projects unrelated to the speculative wave that characterized the post-war reconstruction period, including the coordination of the design of the new Vallette district of Turin. The following decade is characterized by his growing commitment to university teaching and his participation in significant competitions, which will lead him (in collaboration with colleagues Domenico Morelli, Felice Bardelli and Sergio Hutter) to the realization of the project for the new Palazzo dell' University of Turin. Gino Levi-Montalcini has also designed many furnishings throughout his career, starting from the 67 types of furniture for the Gualino palace, to the furnishings of important public places, such as the Salone della Stampa in Turin, to shops, including the Borletti in the San Federico Gallery, at many exhibition stands. Alongside his activity as a designer, Gino Levi-Montalcini added that of a sculptor, for which he had an early vocation, and that of a draftsman, portraitist and caricaturist. His sculptures and his pen and oil portraits remind us, among others, of the figures of many Turin architects, from Pagano to Mollino. His university career, which began at the Polytechnic of Turin where he was a free lecturer in Architectural Composition from 1948 to 1956, continued as a full professor at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Palermo from 1956 to 1964; then at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Padua from 1964 to 1971 and finally in Turin in the two-year period 1971-72. He was President of the Council of the Order of Architects of the Province of Turin in the two-year period 1969-70 and in 1969 he was appointed member of the National Academy of San Luca. Gino Levi-Montalcini passed away in Turin on 29 November 1974.
