Studio Week 7

This week we started our precedent study project, and my group's home is the Casa Rotonda designed by Mario Botta. The home was designed with a desire to enhance the environment in which it sits, apparent in all of the construction documents and parti drawings that are available showing his process in integrating the landscape and thinking about perspective of the inhabitant and onlookers. Originally situated in a rather underdeveloped valley town, its position in the developed area today was designed to allow for the building to strike onlookers as significant and purposeful. Botta worked with a traditional material palette and integrated contemporary details, while exploring geometric purity. Casa Rotonda's construction was completed in 1982 in Switzerland, situating itself in a time where Botta had much experience in building his style, but still more to refine his signature before his retirement from the design world. Botta was very involved in competitions for large projects around this time in his career, and you can see him experimenting with composition and materials in smaller scale projects like Rotonda as a result. For example, the Andre Malraux theater that was commissioned at the time the construction of Rotonda was finished has striking similarities with the design and use of materials, influenced by ideas and concepts discovered through the houses development. Continuing with the style he coined, even as late as 2005 Botta was still creating works with similar program and material (Building of Mario Botta, Basel).