An Open Work: At Home with Marco Zanuso in Midcentury Milan

The first English-language publication to focus on the iconic architect-designer Marco Zanuso, revealing his design approach through a narrated tour of his 1960s Milan apartment.

An Open Work investigates the celebrated, enigmatic Italian architect-designer Marco Zanuso (1919–2001). Zanuso’s buildings were widely recognized in Italy, and today his object and furniture designs, which won many awards in their time, can be found in prestigious museums worldwide, yet few scholars have addressed the different scales he worked at as parts of a whole. This beautifully written, lavishly illustrated book opens the door to Zanuso’s acclaimed work, specifically his dual focus on architecture and industrial design, a form of practice that many architects in Milan pursued as the Italian economy rebounded in a surge of industrialization after World War II.

Shantel Blakely takes as the book’s principal object of study Zanuso’s apartment for his family in midcentury Milan, a work of architecture that was furnished with the architect's own designs. As Blakely takes the reader from one room in the apartment to the next, detailing floorplans chapter by chapter, objects within each room become points of departure for explorations of Zanuso’s work in broader terms. This cumulative, descriptive method brings to light analogies, resemblances, and other parallels among Zanuso’s objects at the scales of building, furniture, and object—offering an inspired reading of his work while modeling a new way to write architectural and design history.

Shantel Blakely is Assistant Professor at Rice University School of Architecture in Houston. Her writing has appeared in numerous journals, and her research has been supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Getty Research Institute, and the Richard Rogers Fellowship.