Remembering Luigi Snozzi
John Hill
5. January 2021
Image: World-Architects
Swiss architect Luigi Snozzi died on December 29, 2020, at a nursing home in Minusio after contracting the coronavirus. A short video portrait made when he was laureate of the Prix Meret Oppenheim 2018 captures the architect's passions and ideals.
"An architect without a conscience is a disaster," Snozzi says in the short film, "a danger to the public." Although just five minutes long, the video interview with Sozzi strongly conveys the qualities that have made the Ticino-based architect so appealing to other architects. Much of the film looks at Monte Carasso, where he first inserted a school in the late 1970s but had a lasting impact, due to the design of additional buildings as well as the development of urban guidelines and the extension of his ideals to students who carry on projects there. His modern buildings may not look particularly radical, but Snozzi defined his architecture as such: "Radicalism simply means focusing on what is essential. To have a thousand problems related to an issue and recognize the two or three most important ones — that is radicalism."