About me

The same school, twice

Milan — 1985

Black and white portrait: Matteo Gardino standing at the drawing table in the studio, one hand on his hip and the other resting on the sheets, metal shelving behind him — In the studio, at the drawing table.

I was born in Milan in 1985 and I work in Milan, at via dell’Annunciata 23/2, at Studio Gardino Architettura. My father Alberto opened the studio in 1976, straight out of university; I joined him in 2011.

Alberto Gardino drawing a piece of furniture in axonometric projection by hand at the studio drawing table, Matteo Gardino sitting opposite, pointing at a spot on the sheet — My father Alberto and me, at the drawing table: **we run the studio together**. He draws by hand, I sit on the other side of the sheet.

The Politecnico, and Mozambique

I graduated in 2010 from the Politecnico di Milano, in Environmental Architecture. The thesis was not an exercise: it was a resort at Murrebue, in Mozambique, commissioned by a real client while I was still a student. The story and the drawings are on this page.

That is where I learned the thing I still use: before drawing, measure what it costs to bring a material to where it is needed. In Mozambique it was measured in kilometres.

With Cini Boeri

I joined the studio of Cini Boeri, in via Cappuccio, on a three-month university placement. I stayed a year and a half, because at the end of the three months it was she who asked me to stay.

There I saw how a studio really works: architecture and all the furniture — including for makers like Arflex — with the same care over the choice of materials for a house and for a chair.

Ever since, I have enjoyed making one-off design pieces. That is why these pages carry, alongside the flats, the drawings of a few examples: a table, a lamp, a ring, a pair of earrings.

At the Triennale di Milano for the thousandth issue of Domus: Matteo Gardino with Stefano Boeri and Giovanna Mazzocchi, in front of the domusMILLE poster — At the Triennale, for the thousandth issue of **Domus**: with **Stefano Boeri**, Cini’s son, and **Giovanna Mazzocchi**, the publisher of Domus, who had organised the evening.

The building site, before the studio

After graduating I went to Enex, as assistant to the site safety manager, and worked on public refurbishments in Milan. It was not a fallback: I wanted to see close up the part of the job that drawings do not tell you about — the trades, the timings, the things that do not add up once they are built.

A year in São Paulo

Then I went to Brazil for a year, split between the studio of Paulo Mendes da Rocha and Lovisaro Arquitetura e Design.

Mendes da Rocha did not pay me. As payment he gave me a Paulistano armchair, the seat he had designed in 1957: a bent steel rod and a stretched hide. He had it delivered to my home in April 2013, when he came to Italy to collect a prize in Venice: he stopped in Milan first and took me out to dinner. The armchair now sits in a flat in Brera that I renovated some years later. It is there in the published photographs of that house, and nobody has ever noticed it.

Brazil also produced the first job carried out entirely outside Italy: an Italian sandwich bar in São Paulo, drawn on the spot, in a space rented for the purpose.

In Paulo Mendes da Rocha's studio in São Paulo: he leafs through an album of drawings seated at the wooden table, Matteo Gardino listening, a green blackboard behind them — In his studio in São Paulo, in front of the blackboard.

Paulo Mendes da Rocha and Matteo Gardino in a Milanese trattoria, the evening of the prize — In Milan, the evening of that dinner: he was in Italy for a prize in Venice. The **Paulistano** arrived at my home after that visit.

Handwritten note from Paulo Mendes da Rocha: the pen dedication «Para Matteo com o abraço do», below it a drawing made with a single line that ends in his signature, and the date 4.2013 — **The note that came with the armchair**, in his own hand: «*Para Matteo com o abraço do*», and under it a single line that runs and finally becomes the signature. At the bottom, the date: 4.2013.

The same school, thirty-four years apart

There is a coincidence I only discovered late. At the Politecnico, my father was first a student of Marco Zanuso, then his teaching assistant, and finally a designer in his studio — and he was all of that while running his own practice alongside, for years. Cini Boeri, whose studio I passed through, had worked for Zanuso for eleven years before opening her own.

Neither of us chose it for that reason: he graduated in 1976, I did in 2010. But the school is the same, and you can recognise it in the way we work: few materials, well built, and no wish to astonish anyone.

Alberto and Matteo Gardino outdoors, bent over a site plan unrolled on a stone table, among the walls of a building under construction — And on site: the plan unrolled on a stone table.

Today

I have been registered with the Order of Architects of Milan since 2015, number 19187, and I work as designer and as site supervisor.

I work mostly on buildings that already exist: flats, farmhouses to bring back, offices and company premises to put right, clothes shops, villas, and ruins where the only thing still standing is the vegetation and the ground around it. Outside Italy I have worked in Switzerland, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Sri Lanka and in Dubai; in the United States, when needed, as an external associate of the practice of Larry S. Davis, in Houston. In Mexico I follow the projects together with my brother Saverio.

The rest of what I think about this job is written into the projects, which is where it belongs.

Luggage that keeps filling up

I am someone who lives on feeling, and who tries to be moved and to wonder like a child, every single day, even at the smallest things he happens to see: light coming in sideways, a material that has aged well, a courtyard that opens where you did not expect one.

That is not a line put here to sound good: it is the material I work with. Everything that strikes me goes into a personal store that keeps being topped up, and sooner or later it comes back out in a project — in a line of light on a bedroom wall, in a mirror set where the wall ends, in an armchair carried from the other side of the world and put in a flat in Brera.

Travelling has helped me a great deal here, and travelling a lot: I have built every trip around the buildings I wanted to see in person, and not only in books. In Japan, to give one example, I went to see almost everything Tadao Ando has built.

Tadao Ando's Row House in Sumiyoshi: a blind concrete wall with a narrow slot for the entrance, wedged between the traditional houses of a narrow Osaka street — The **Row House** in Sumiyoshi, Osaka, 1976: a blind concrete wall wedged between the old houses, and a single slot to get in. It is the building that made Ando’s name.

Matteo Gardino sitting inside the Row House, between the concrete walls: a slot of light, the block stair rising towards the courtyard and a small tree in a pot — **I went inside.** The open courtyard cuts the house in half and all the light comes from there; to go from one room to another you cross the open air, even when it rains. Which is why there are umbrellas, bottom right.

Matteo Gardino holding a suitcase, standing in an opening cut through an exposed concrete wall, under the timber trusses of the old customs house and above a lit glass floor — And there is an Ando in Italy too: **Punta della Dogana**, in Venice. Inside the walls and trusses of the old customs house, a concrete box that does not try to look old. Suitcase in hand, because I go and see these things.

Outside the studio

I race karts, kz 125 gearbox class, in a semi-professional championship. It is not a comfortable pastime: you drive with your body, you lose by a tenth of a second, and the machine has to be prepared every time.

It matters to me because it is more like the job than it looks: what counts is repetition, not the flash of genius.

And the machine, in the end, is a project too: I designed the bodywork of my kart myself, from the black to the white to the red line that holds the two halves together.

Matteo Gardino in black racing overalls with red gloves, standing in the paddock of a circuit — Looking for precision, and each time trying to push your own limit a little further out.

Matteo Gardino sitting in his kart holding his helmet: black and white bodywork with a continuous red line, the number 22 on the nose and his name on the side pod — Besides drawing the bodywork, I **followed the build**: from choosing the chassis to the colour to give it, through to starting it up.

If you have read this far and you have a house, an office or a ruin to put right, the simplest thing is to tell me.

Write to me, or book a first meeting→

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Studio Gardino Architettura Via dell’Annunciata 23/2 — 20121 Milan — Italy
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Registered with the Order of Architects of Milan, no. 19187 © Matteo Gardino. The projects, drawings and texts are mine; the photographs and renderings are by whoever is credited on each project page.
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