The Young Sensualist

Every five or six years, a different country takes the architectural lead in Europe: England came to the fore with High Tech in the early 1980s; by the end of the 1980s, France came to prominence with François Mitterand’s great Parisian projects; in the 1990s, Spain and Portugal were discovering a new tradition; and recently the focus has been on the Netherlands. In this ever shifting European landscape, Italy is now set to challenge the status quo. Already home to some of the world’s most renowned architects – Renzo Piano, Massimiliano Fuksas and Antonio Citterio – it also has many talented architects like Mario Cucinella, Italo Rota, Stefano Boeri, the ABDR group and Maria Giuseppina Grasso Cannizzo, who are now gaining international attention. Moreover there is an extraordinary emergence of younger architects – the Erasmus generation – who are beginning to realise some very promising buildings of their own.