Published by Park Books in 2024, this German-language monograph surveys the work of Turin architects Sergio Jaretti and Elio Luzi, whose buildings between 1954 and 1974 developed a formal repertoire that sat apart from the broad currents of Italian postwar practice. Where the prevailing language leaned on rationalist discipline — planar facades, standardized mass housing — the two architects worked in sculptural, generously modeled envelopes and deep, diagonally staggered plans. The publisher’s selection of illustrated projects includes Casa dell’Obelisco, Via Saluzzo and Via Ormea, Torri Pitagora, Piazza Statuto and Via Gorizia. Seen together, the work argues that a housing block could be both a serious civic object and an occasion for spatial invention.
The book’s case rests on rebuilt drawings, reproductions of original plans, a newly commissioned photographic documentation, and essays. The photography is credited to Simon Jüttner, Markus Lanz, and Sebastian Schels, working as the PK Odessa Co., with Bernd Schmutz and Dominik Fiederling serving as editors. Twelve large residential buildings, alongside private houses designed by Jaretti and Luzi, receive detailed documentation, which makes the volume as much an archive of individual projects as a thematic argument.
What distinguishes the edition is the way that material is assembled. Drawings and archival plans are put in sequence with contemporary photographs, so that the housing schemes can be read as both construction problems and visual propositions. The publisher presents the volume as the first survey of their complete oeuvre, giving readers a way to connect buildings that have received little sustained attention together. For collectors working through the back catalogues of postwar modernism, monographs of this kind — patient in building, careful in illustration — offer material for comparing photographs with plans and assessing how buildings occupy their urban setting.
The publication was recognized with a DAM Architectural Book Award in 2025 and the 2025/26 German Photobook Prize gold medal for Coffee Table Book. Its subject is narrow; its handling is not. A reader with an interest in postwar residential architecture, in regional Italian practice, or in the crossover between architecture and photography will find the volume durable precisely because it was conceived as an argument rather than an album.
