In the early months of 1982, at the height of Postmodernism, a very atypical book was published in Italy, which was L’architetto fuori di sé, by Marta Lonzi. This is a book on architecture, but published by a feminist publisher; it is a critique on the practice of architectural design at the time, but written as a testimony. This resulted from intertwining the (feminist) practice of self-awareness with the study of the history of architecture. Here, Lonzi displays her own experience as an architect and a woman, dissociating herself from the analyses and propositions being formulated by contemporary architectural culture.

Her vision was far from an architecture understood as an expression of the will to power: she thought of architecture rather as a meeting of subjectivities, those – individual or collective – of the client or commissioning body and of the designer: “A good architect is not one who creates new architecture, who designs unprecedented solutions, but the one who succeeds in arousing in people thoughts and feelings that otherwise would not be consciously expressed”.

Thanks to circulation through the international circuits of feminism, the publication of Lonzi’s book earned her invitations to speak abroad, first in Strasbourg, then Nancy, Berlin, and finally Spain (La Coruña, Malaga, Toledo). Years later, Pasquala Campos de la Michelena, the first, and for many years the only, female Professor of Architectural Design in Spain, introducing the volume Mujeres: Espacio y arquitectura (1999) addressed a special thanks to Lonzi, “por su apoyo a mi proceso de integracion de la actividad profesiónal con la comprensión feminista del mundo”.

An additional note on Marta Lonzi (1938-2008)

After many years of silence, there is a renewed interest in Marta Lonzi’s name, which was first heard in the 1970s amid the voices in the group Rivolta Femminile, but at that time certainly overshadowed by the dazzling ideas of her sister Carla.

The appearance of the book L’architetto fuori di sè in 1982 produced a new echo, intended as it was to raise questions among those involved in the creative process. The book was influential essentially in feminist circles, but from here it reached a public in the professional discipline as well: in Italy it made a definitive break with the academic world, while abroad – especially in Berlin, France and Spain – it stirred interest and curiosity. Marta was then called to universities in those countries to hold design courses.

Marta was principally a designer: sensitive to the urban scale, refined in her interior designs. It would take longer for her value in the physical creation of spaces to be recognised and for her to be counted among the most inspiring Italian figures in the field of architecture of interiors. Her projects, characterised by a composition of wooden and glass partitions often curved to the limits of structural possibilities, were exhibited and published in magazines like Domus, Rassegna, Abitare, Casa Vogue.

Her patient work of regenerating Pietralata, an outer suburb of Rome, where she worked in the second half of the 1990s with neighbourhood committees, despite years of struggle, remained a proposal. Her solitary approach, made up of stubborn research and study, went decidedly against the tide. The publication of Autenticità e progetto (2006), marking her return (after thirty years) to a teaching post in an Italian university, went almost unnoticed. Then there was silence, culminating in her death in 2008.

Since 2017, Marta Lonzi’s archive has been deposited at the Elvira Badaracco Foundation in Milan, which has ordered and catalogued it. From that moment, several researchers from Italy and abroad, interested in this very peculiar figure of designer, have passed through the door of the Foundation to engage with her archive.

The digital exhibition ‘Marta Lonzi Autenticità e progetto’ can be consulted on the Badaracco Foundation website.