The Academy of Architecture commemorates Oliviero Toscani

The USI Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio with a profound commotion, would like to pay tribute to the great photographer and Maestro Oliviero Toscani who, thanks to his free and visionary mind, contributed in his early years to setting the path for an innovative and successful school of architecture.

With his course on ‘visual communication’, which he held in Mendrisio from 1996 to 1998, he aimed to re-educate the Academy's students in terms of language, in perceiving images and the world around us with the idea that ‘...not everyone who studies architecture will become architects. But even those who will later be photographers, graphic designers, teachers, if they have studied architecture, will be privileged... Architecture is a philosophy with, in addition, the concrete call of manual work... Architecture that respects man and the environment is always a sign of a renaissance...’. His was a call to civilisation, which even then seemed increasingly suffocated by material values, an invitation to free ourselves from cultural superstructures and return to a ‘...language purified of the waste of mass civilisation...’.

On 16 April 2008, photographer Oliviero Toscani held a public lecture at the Aula Magna of the USI Campus in Lugano titled "Media and advertising: who influences whom?"

L'Università della Svizzera italiana expresses its sincere condolences to his family.