Carlo Perogalli

Carlo Perogalli (Milan, June 25, 1921 - Milan, 2005) was an Italian architect, architectural historian and academic.
Bibliography.
Carlo Perogalli graduated in Architecture at the Milan Polytechnic in 1946, becoming the assistant of Ambrogio Annoni the following year.
After becoming a pupil of Gio Ponti, he began working in Gio Ponti's studio.
In 1950 he opened a studio in Milan with the designer Attilio Mariani with whom he collaborated on research and projects until 1958.
Perogalli and Mariani as the maximum expression of their conceptual research after becoming among the major representatives of the MAC Movimento Arte Concreta, they designed the buildings in viale Beatrice d'Este 24 (1951- 52) and viale Beatrice d'Este 26 (1955-56) in the quadronno district of the historic center of Milan.
At the end of the realization Perogalli will decide to devote himself slowly to university teaching to carry out conceptual research on his own creations of the buildings in Viale Beatrice d'Este in Milan, elaborating the relationships between architecture and the arts.
In 1954 he obtained the university chair of "Stylistic and Constructive Characters of Monuments" and in 1958 that of "Restoration of Monuments"; from 1960 to 1991 the chair of "History of Architecture" at the Politecnico di Milano.
He publishes over forty volumes on architecture and restoration, as well as many writings of conceptual reflection between design and art.
According to the studies of Luciano Caramel on the MAC, in the story of the movement it is appropriate to identify a periodization in two phases: the first that goes from 1948 to 1952 characterized by the prevalence of painting. The second, on the other hand, from 1952 to 1958, sees architects, engineers and design also enter the debate.
Style.
In the continuation on his analysis, the architect finds in the artistic currents from Cubism to Concrete Art, the passage from the work of art as an end in itself to the object. Following this dialogue, there was a real exchange of forms between the world of the arts and that of machines and objects produced by industry. Architecture encounters is above all the sharing of the different arts in the same forms: architecture can risk the forms of painting and sculpture, languages ​​therefore become common and space can be shared, indeed we could say concrete.
To some architects it seemed that decoration in architecture was not really, or not at all, that "crime". Perogalli was the bearer of a powerful instance of renewal capable of overcoming the monopoly created by rationalism-functionalism in view of a new and more dialectical way of understanding design.