Vittorio Gregotti. Autobiografia del XX secolo

Over fifty short autobiographical essays covering sixty years of Vittorio Gregotti's career, which offer a parallel and complete panorama of architecture in the twentieth century, seen from within, through the eyes of one of its important key players.

"I graduated in architecture in 1953, just at the half way point of the century, and then I worked as an architect for over fifty years. This has placed me in a particularly strategic position: a participant and observer, impassioned and partisan, during the second half of the twentieth century, yet also in a position to meet many of the protagonists of the first half of the twentieth century personally, and to see the architecture and read books regarding the formation of modern architecture and its crisis with the same passion and partiality.
I would like to offer a testimony of this, though they are rather incomplete sketches, without any pretensions of providing an overall historical judgement of a century that was as tragic in its events as it was glorious for architecture, it seems to me that the influence of its tradition is far from spent. These are fragments from memories of extraordinary people who were important and certainly not only for my work as an architect.
Naturally this opens a complicated interplay of memories (and further adjournment of memories, as each one of these encounters could be the subject of a whole book) and the present day points of view on them. Opinions and choices therefore are those dictated by the bias of the twenty-first century in an incurable European context. Discontinuous memories, therefore, in space and time are conceived as in indispensable terrain with which to solidly get into touch before setting out on any journey."