Our First Thirty Years: On Corvino + Multari

Published both in English and in Italian, the volume edited by Pierre-Alain Croset on Vincenzo Corvino and Giovanni Multari retraces the two architects’ professional activity over the past thirty years, from the founding of their office in Naples in 1995 to 2025. If, at first glance, the book seems to belong to a well-recognized editorial genre, perhaps even a literary genre, that of the retrospective monograph devoted to the work of an architectural practice, its structure, tone, and documentary apparatus suggest a broader ambition. It is not merely a reasoned analysis of built works and unrealized projects, nor an organized portfolio. Rather, it is a long and patient dialogical path that aims to bring into focus and understand how an architectural practice takes shape over time, through projects, commissions, missed opportunities, collaborations, technical constraints, institutional negotiations, and shared responsibilities.

Drawing on a long and well-established critical, professional, and academic career, Croset brings together analyses and descriptions, testimonies and dialogues, images and drawings, chronologies and critical texts, in order to give substance to the public dimension of Corvino and Multari’s professional career. In doing so, he avoids some of the recurring risks of the architectural monograph: pure celebration, the isolation of the authors from their context, the absence of clients and real constraints. To realize a work of architecture requires the joint and coherent effort of many people, each carrying different skills and interests; it requires time, patience, and trust. The career of Corvino and Multari is thus reconstructed as a relational process. The title, Architecture in Dialogue with the City, should therefore be understood not only as a description of the two architects’ relationship with the urban context, but also as the underlying methodology of the volume.

Overall, the book presents twenty-six projects in depth, while the conversations refer to a broader corpus of fifty-four projects discussed in the interviews and approximately one hundred works listed in the complete chronology. Of these, twenty-one are still under construction. The volume opens with Croset’s introductory essay, “Architecture as Dialogue,” followed by six thematic sections. What makes this volume unique is its narrative structure, which is based on a continuous dialogue between theory and practice, between history and future, between project and society. Each section is introduced by a long conversation between Corvino, Multari, and the author, before giving way to a portfolio of photographs and drawings devoted to a selection of projects, each accompanied by a critical-descriptive note.

The first section, “Public Spaces and Urban Connections,” opens with an overview of the architects’ university education, their early engagement with academia, and their initial professional assignments. It then explores the practice’s experience in designing collective places: public areas, squares, commercial spaces, and devices of urban connection, such as the restoration of the covered market in Reggio Emilia (2009–12).

The second section, “Monumental Restorations,” is built around two particularly significant interventions: the restoration of the Pirelli Tower in Milan (1998–2005) and the renovation of the Capodimonte Museum in Naples (2020–25). Around these works, a broader reflection also opens up on the practice’s relationship with the public dimension of contemporary art, through collaborations with artists such as Mimmo Paladino and Christiane Löhr. Other renovation projects are also discussed, such as the Aragonese Castle in Baia (2019–25) and the Tempio della Scorziata in Naples (2017–26).

With “Representation Buildings,” the third section shifts attention to the representative value of architectures that are not necessarily monumental. The path moves from small-scale interventions in Naples’ metropolitan area to the major project for the new Public Prosecutor’s Office in Catanzaro, housed in a former convent that later became a military hospital (2017–22), passing through the practice’s participation in numerous international design competitions. The theme is not only that of the institutional building, but of the way in which architecture can construct public presence without resorting to monumentality as a means of expression.

The fourth section, “The ‘House Inside the House’,” introduces a reflection on the ways in which a contemporary structure can be inserted inside an existing building. The theme is addressed through the shifting relationship between continuity and transformation, confirmation and repair, adaptation and autonomy of the new intervention. It includes the international competition developed in collaboration with Kengo Kuma in 2021 for the renovation of the municipal stadium in Florence, Pier Luigi Nervi’s masterpiece.

The fifth section, “The Functions of Inhabiting: Residences and Schools,” is the one that most clearly returns to a typological classification. It presents a comprehensive exploration of the concept of inhabiting, through residential projects, cooperative housing, social housing, student residences, and public schools. The concept is expanded to encompass the collective, educational, and social forms through which architecture organizes everyday life, up to the extreme conditions implied by the temporary residences and schools built in 2009 following the L’Aquila earthquake.

The final section, “Decommissioned Locations,” is devoted to the most recent projects, many of which are still in progress, such as the recovery of large decommissioned military complexes in Naples, which commenced in 2018, and the series of projects and buildings realised in Mantua (2018–26): a school in a former factory, a new gymnasium, and the conversion of a series of sheds connected by an organic system of public spaces and pathways. It is arguably the aspect in which the practice is directly engaged with the most pressing questions: environmental sustainability, flexibility of use, urban infrastructure conversion, landscape relationships, and restoring function and meaning to places that have completed one historical cycle.

The decision to organize the volume by themes, rather than according to a chronological sequence, is of significance. A chronological structure would have yielded a narrative of professional development and maturation, from the beginnings of the practice to its complete affirmation. The chosen order instead foregrounds not so much the linear evolution of a language as a number of recurring conditions of practice: public space, restoration, institutional representation, reuse, inhabiting, education, and the transformation of decommissioned places. In this sense, it clarifies the way in which the author interprets the work of Corvino and Multari.

The six sections do not simply classify the projects according to typology or function. They define six situations in which architecture is called upon to establish a necessary relationship with what already exists, with what precedes it, conditions it, and in part resists it: the city, the monument, the institution, an interior, a community, an abandoned building, or a decommissioned site in search of lost time. The book thus interprets architectural practice as a continuous negotiation between design intention and the conditions of reality. The project is not presented as the abstract application of a formal principle, but as a situated response, constructed in dialogue with material constraints, memories, functions, public expectations, and shared responsibilities.

The function of the three-way conversations is therefore central. These are not conventional interviews placed before the images as explanatory material, nor are they biographical digressions. They constitute, in themselves, the critical place through which the reasons of the project open up and become legible: the conditions of the commission, the relationship with the site, the presence of pre-existing structures, the role of public administrations, the technical and administrative limitations of the process, the instances in which an initial idea is compelled to adapt to prevailing circumstances. The conversations also allow works not presented in the main portfolios to enter the discussion, so that the selected projects do not appear as isolated episodes, but as part of a broader flow of attempts, continuities, and variations. In this, it is perhaps also Croset’s long experience between 1982 and 1996 as Vittorio Gregotti’s assistant editor in the editorial office of Casabella that gives the volume its specific rhythm. Rather than moving directly from one completed work to the next, the narrative sequence alternates between discussion and visual documentation, reflection and evidence. For this very reason, the volume might perhaps have benefited from the inclusion of some sketches made during the meetings. Not as an additional illustrative apparatus, but as a visible trace of the simultaneously narrative and scientific value of dialogues in which the project is reconstructed in its reasons, its reconsiderations, and its premises.

The portfolios of full-page photographs and drawings, as well as the small reference images that accompany and illustrate the dense conversations between Croset, Corvino, and Multari on the opposite page, are graphically designed according to an alternating rhythm, precisely curated by the graphic designers Leonardo Sonnoli and Irene Bacchi. This alternation is especially relevant because it prevents the images from becoming autonomous objects of admiration, mere objects of aesthetic contemplation. Instead, it places them within a web of intentions, decisions, constraints, and consequences. The book thus offers the reader the opportunity not only to look at the projects, but also to understand their conditions of possibility. The care given to the book as an object also confirms this approach.

The Venetian publisher Marsilio Arte has produced a volume of considerable editorial value, with a grey fabric cover and an original graphic identity developed specifically for this editorial project. In the wake of Venice’s long graphic tradition, from Aldus Manutius to Carlo Scarpa, the new typeface used on the cover is based on the number seven, corresponding to the number of letters in each of the two surnames, “Corvino”and “Multari”: seven strokes generate each letter, as well as the “+” sign that joins them. Made possible by a freedom of editing that is far from self-evident today, and by Marsilio Arte’s care for the book as an editorial object even within the chronic crisis of architectural publishing. The graphic design makes visible, in the very form of the book, the identity of the professional office as a relational construction, founded on the interweaving of two figures and on the continuity of shared work.

The section that is perhaps most revealing of the book’s ethos is found in the final apparatus. From page 316 to page 331, the volume lists, project by project, the credits of the works discussed: project managers, structural engineers, construction supervisors, building contractors, consultants, artistic directors, those responsible for functional programs, electrical and mechanical engineers, geologists, landscape architects, rendering technicians, municipal officers, representatives of the heritage authorities, and many other figures. Normally, little attention is paid to such information, which is frequently reduced to a marginal note or eliminated entirely, as if the realization of a work could still be traced back to a single name, a single gesture, a single responsibility. Here, instead, it occupies fifteen pages and is subject to the same editorial scrutiny as the remainder of the volume. This choice makes visible the collective structure of architectural production. The built work does not appear as the result of an isolated creative act, but as the outcome of a complex network of decisions, skills, authorizations, responsibilities, and forms of labor. At the same time, the credits do not diminish the role of the architect; on the contrary, they clarify it. They show that the architect’s responsibility consists in giving coherence to a shared undertaking, in holding together design intentions, technical constraints, administrative conditions, specialized expertise, and public expectations.

The volume thus presents the architecture of Corvino and Multari as a practice founded on the ethical dimension of relation: with context, with existing buildings, with institutions, with technical knowledge, with collaborators, and with the communities for which architecture is ultimately produced. For these reasons, the book does not construct the image of the architect as an autonomous author, whose works are entrusted to immediate recognizability, and yet it does not dissolve architecture into process. The book’s strength lies in the ability to hold together this disciplinary complexity: the tangible and visual presence of the projects and the network of circumstances through which they are conceived, discussed, modified, approved, and realized, and sometimes cancelled, ultimately reaffirming the value of the project as a critical, civic, and cultural instrument.

It is, then, certainly a comprehensive overview of the first thirty years of Corvino and Multari’s career, but also a profound reflection on the very nature of architectural practice as such, and on the possibility of understanding the project as a shared responsibility. It is here that Croset’s contribution becomes most evident. His role has not been to construct a critical apparatus attached to a corpus of already completed works, but to build around the work of Corvino and Multari a critical frame through which that corpus can be deciphered. The book’s significance, therefore, lies in the model of architectural culture it proposes. It suggests that the monograph can still be an intellectually alive and significant critical form when it does not limit itself to assembling projects, when it reconstructs the conditions of practice, when it recognizes the collective nature of architectural production, and when it understands the city not as a neutral background, but as a field of forces in which architecture grounds, operates, and tests its public responsibility. In this sense, Corvino + Multari: Architecture in Dialogue with the City is a reflection, constructed with attention, measure, and precision, on the ethical conditions through which architecture becomes a real work, and on what it means today to assume responsibility for this process.