Studio BBPR
Studio B.B.P.R. was an architectural partnership founded in Milan in 1932 by Gianluigi Banfi (1910-1945), Lodovico Barbiano di Belgiojoso (1909-2004), Enrico Peressutti (1908-1976) and Ernesto Nathan Rogers (1909-1969), whose family initials gave the practice its name.
The four were united by their opposition to Fascism and looked for an alternative to both the regime's monumental classicism and the universal principles of the International Style. They found it in what Rogers described as preesistenze ambientali, the pre-existing environment: an architecture that engages with the historical, cultural and physical reality of a place instead of imposing a single formula on it.
All four founders of Studio B.B.P.R. had studied at the Politecnico di Milano, and the practice they set up in 1932 took its name from the first letters of their family names. They found one another in their opposition to fascism in Italy during the 1930s and 1940s, under Mussolini's autocratic regime, and resolved to develop a style that carried no reference to contemporary politics. Rogers, who was Jewish, fled to Switzerland. Belgiojoso and Banfi were deported to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, where Banfi died in 1945.
Despite the loss of Banfi, the partnership kept the name it had carried before the war, and the 1950s in particular brought many of its major projects. The architects were also frequently engaged for complete interiors, furniture designs included.
The partnership set itself against the International Style, against its rectilinear forms and taut, unornamented planes, and enriched its buildings with medieval references instead. Its position on art and architecture sits somewhere between tradition and modernism: the use of post-and-beam structures and modular elements runs parallel to the constructive thinking of modern architects. Where modernism rejected historical form outright, B.B.P.R. reinterpreted that inheritance and worked on with respect for its predecessors.
Rogers called the approach preesistenze ambientali and worked caso per caso, case by case, with the surroundings rather than against them. The Torre Velasca in Milan, with its strong references to medieval architecture, is among the partnership's best-known designs.