Four illustrious travelers cross the United States from west to east, photographing America's architecture at its heyday.
In the spring of 1966, the architects Umberto Riva and Luisa Castiglioni, the flaneur Enzo Muzii and the art patron Hans Deichmann hired a car in San Francisco in which to travel the length and breadth of the United States and photograph the architecture of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Louis Kahn, Frank Lloyd Wright and many others. They visited California and the South (Phoenix, Dallas, New Orleans and Atlanta) before heading up to Chicago and Philadelphia, only to reach New York after a month on the road. A Grand Tour comprising cities, architecture, deserts and encounters. An educational journey, but also a discoveryof America in its heyday, captured in magnificent black and white by a group of cultured European travellers. That journey became issue 17 of Zodiac, the international architecture magazine published by Olivetti, while the contact sheets containing the photographs of the four travellers has re-emerged only recently. The book retraces that journey and explores the context in which it took place through the critical contributions of Gabriele Neri, Maddalena Scarzella and Maria Bottero, editor of Zodiac at the time.
Luisa Castiglioni was an architect and designer, putting her name to refined projects for interiors as well as both public and private buildings.
Hans Deichmann (1907-2004) was a German entrepreneur and was married to Luisa Castiglioni. He was a hero of the anti-Nazi resistance. Events he would recount late in life, in the autobiographical volume Objects.
Enzo Muzii (1926-2014) was an Italian director, writer and photographer. He was a key figure on the Roman cultural scene throughout the second half of the twentieth century.
Umberto Riva (1928-2021) was an architect and designer, one of the masters of Italianarchitecture between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A student of Carlo Scarpa, he inherited from him the artistic and artisanal attitude of the project, the taste for open forms and the sensitivity for an operational scale that extends from the material detail to the landscape. His work ranges from the design of objects and lamps where light becomes the protagonist, to urban housing projects, private and public buildings, exhibition installations and an important painting parenthesis.
