Mario Botta

Born 1943 · Swiss · 12 buildings on the wall

Mario Botta (born 1943) is a Swiss architect known for buildings made from very simple geometric shapes, often in brick or stone, that create unusual spaces. He designed his first building, a two-family house in Ticino, at 16. He graduated from the Università Iuav di Venezia in 1969, and in Venice he met and worked with Carlo Scarpa, Louis Kahn and Le Corbusier.

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Évry Cathedral near Paris (1995) looks as if it were built entirely of brick but is two concrete cylinders faced with brick in horizontal bands. The Church of San Giovanni Battista in Mogno (1996) replaces a 17th-century church flattened by an avalanche in 1986; Botta built it from the marble and granite of the surrounding valleys. The Cymbalista Synagogue in Tel Aviv (1998) raises two matching towers that are square at the base and turn into circles at the top. MART in Rovereto (2002), a "pantheon without a facade", arranges three floors of galleries around a round court under a 40-metre glass dome. Mario Botta's buildings are studied for how symmetry, simple solids and heavy materials give a place its identity.

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