Manuel Orazi's 'Vite stravaganti di architetti' profiles 41 elusive architects

Manuel Orazi's new book 'Vite stravaganti di architetti' (Giometti & Antonello, 2025) presents 41 short portraits of architects he calls 'elusive figures' who acted as 'pollinators of ideas' despite leaving sparse intellectual traces. The volume reworks texts Orazi wrote for weekly and daily magazines over twenty years, now collected under the editorial direction of Milena Ibro after the deaths of founders Gino Giometti (2023) and Danni Antonello (2017). Each portrait pairs a biography with a review and a quirky epithet: 'Snob' for Adolf Loos, 'Contropiedista' for Peter Eisenman, 'Atacchica' for Gae Aulenti, 'Anarchitetto' for Gianni Pettena. Orazi deliberately avoids canonical figures like Palladio or Renzo Piano, focusing instead on marginal, lesser-known personalities such as Shadrach Woods, Yona Friedman, and Ivo Pannaggi. The final chapter is dedicated to Italo Rota, a friend of the author. Orazi's method, inspired by Geminello Alvi's 'Uomini del Novecento' and the eccentric biographies of Dino Baldi, Robert Walser, and Ermanno Cavazzoni, aims for an accessible, non-academic tone without footnotes. The book is described as a personal archive rather than a systematic catalog, offering an intimate and humanizing view of these architects.