Take a Rare Look Inside an Ahead-of-Its-Time Home by Italian Architect Umberto Riva
Maria Bottero has lived in an avant-garde Milan apartment designed by her former husband since 1969. She recently opened her door to a duo of photographers for the first time in half a century.
Maria Bottero has lived in an avant-garde Milan apartment designed by her former husband since 1969. She recently opened her door to a duo of photographers for the first time in half a century.
"Umberto’s attention was unfaltering; for him, there were no minor details," writes Maria Bottero of the apartment where, at 93, she has lived since she was 37 years old. She’s referring to her former husband, Umberto Riva, the Italian architect and painter with a cult following, whose work softened the hard edges of brutalism with expressive angles and unexpected materials. Her Milan apartment and the building that houses it are often referred to as the first major works by the architect, who died in 2021; they show the influence of his onetime professor Carlo Scarpa, though rendered in rough-and-ready materials rather than fine marble. Riva left the concrete structure of the eighth-floor flat raw and then added geometric cutaways; angular wooden furnishings; and soft, spare colors. At roughly 1,000 square feet, it feels like a single room flowing around a series of free-floating walls. For her part, Maria has spent the last 56 years filling her home with art, books, and other trappings of her life as a designer, editor, and professor, turning Riva’s work into a space all her own.
Maria Bottero taught for decades at Politecnico di Milano and for a period served as editor-in-chief of the influential architecture magazine Zodiac. (The publication ran from 1957 to 1973 and is now a major vintage score.) Her apartment is filled with the design flourishes of her former husband, architect Umberto Riva, and her own collections of objects.
Photo by Allegra Martin
In 2023, photographers Allegra Martin and Francesco Paleari documented her life in the apartment for a book published last year by Spazio, the first time the space has been photographed since a 1969 shoot. The result is a slender, meticulously printed volume, one that shows the inventiveness of the architecture and, more important, evokes Maria’s life there over decades.
"This living room, with its tapered shape, is a bit expressionist," Maria writes in a new book about the apartment. "It’s clear to me that Umberto’s first rule was to breach the rigidity of right angles."
Photo by Francesco Paleari
Much of the original furniture remains in the home, including wooden bookshelves set into concrete room dividers. "I find the way he resolved the corners with obtuse angles quite beautiful," writes Maria. "He used the same detail for both the table and the bookcase." The photographers were drawn to the materials in addition to the form of the furnishings. "I love all the materials inside the house, especially those that were used by Riva to create the furniture," says Francesco Paleari, who with Allegra Martin shot the apartment for the first time in decades for the book.
Photo by Allegra Martin
See the full story on Dwell.com: Take a Rare Look Inside an Ahead-of-Its-Time Home by Italian Architect Umberto Riva
Related stories:
