Piero Bottoni's colorful city, theory, design and building

Piero Bottoni’s work (1903-1973) testifies a great attention to color. Since the youth to the professional maturity he pursued a personal concept of urban space in which the colorful fronts enhanced the plastic nature of the architecture. This attention is already evident in the early notebooks from the university time. It is well confirmed with the exposition of 6 original watercolor paints at the 3rd Triennale of Monza in 1927. With the "Cromatismi architettonici" he stated his color concept and developed a special relationship between the color and the urban space. He experimented the integration between the shape and the color on the street sides. The tectonic shades on the building fronts shapes the urban space with a gradual clearing upward. This solution, inspired by Leonardo’s aerial perspective complaint a "constructive" concept of color, close to the avant-garde of the time. The assets of Bottoni’s Archive testify the maintenance of peculiar characters in his color concept, confirmed by the comparison between the theoretical writings, the experimentation and the building: thirty years later he takes up the same color pattern in the project for the City Hall of Sesto San Giovanni (1961-71)