USA 1966

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 discovery of 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 sheet 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.