NOIRE

Leonardo Mosso was born in Turin in 1926. After graduating in Architecture at the Polytechnic of Turin in 1951, he worked to a series of precious collaborations with his father Nicola – architect, creative and prolific protagonist of the second Futurism – and he explored a rich network of personal relationships on the international scene. From 1955 to 1958 he worked in Finland in the studio of Alvar Aalto, assuming the title of his equal collaborator and guarantor of the works that the master of Scandinavian modernism would design in Italy in the Sixties and Seventies. During a long and successful career – and for long stretches together with Laura Castagno, his partner in work, research and life, refined intellectual and artist companion – Leonardo Mosso defines the characteristics of an irregular experimental approach to the themes of design research, distinguishing himself as a versatile figure of rare intensity: as well as an architect, a lecturer at the Politechnic of Turin and in some of the most prestigious European universities, he is an indefatigable cultural animator – one of the founders of the Associazione Museo Nazionale del Cinema in 1953, the Istituto Alvar Aalto and the Museo dell’Architettura Arti Applicate e Design in 1971.
As an artist, he creates works and installations on different scales, many of which are included in important international public and private collections.
In 2018, the Centre Pompidou in Paris acquired in its permanent collection a substantial nucleus of his works, the result of his personal reflections as an architect and artist, dedicating to him the solo exhibition Hommage à Leonardo Mosso. Since the 1960s he has been developing the “theory of semiotic structural design” and “non-authoritarian programming”, focusing his research on the elaboration of the concept of “structure”, a vector of significant functional, aesthetic and social contents, on the scale of the graphic sign as well as of the urban or territorial system.