Biographical note

Marta Lonzi was born in Florence on 13 April 1938. In 1929 her mother Giulia Matteini had married Agostino Lonzi, who set up a small manufacturing company a few years before Marta was born. Marta had two elder sisters, Carla and Lidia, and her brothers Vittorio and Alfredo were born after her.

Marta graduated in architecture from the University of Florence with a thesis in urban planning, under the guidance of Riccardo Morandi and Ludovico Quaroni, who played a prominent part in some highly significant events in Italian architecture. She passed the state examination in October 1963 and enrolled in the Order of Architects of Rome, where she had moved after her marriage to Giancarlo Mibelli, an entrepreneur in the timber business active in Rome, the island of Elba and Cagliari. Within a few years, they had three children: Ginevra, Giovanni and Giulia. Marta sought to reconcile her new tasks as a mother with her occupation as an architect working on her first professional projects. 

Through her sister Carla, an art critic and discoverer of the artistic avant-garde in the 1960s, Marta came into contact with artists of that period. From 1967 to 1974 she was an assistant in the course of Architectural Composition, with Alberto Samonà and Ludovico Quaroni, at the University of Rome. In the spring of 1970 she supported the Manifesto of Rivolta Femminile, a fundamental experience of Italian feminism begun by Carla Lonzi (with C. Accardi and E. Banotti) in Rome, which then spread to other Italian cities (Milan, Turin, Genoa...), as well as the subsequent establishment of the publishing house of the same name in Milan in 1971. In these years, she began to develop the theoretical premises of the “real and non-sublimated” creative process, an approach to architecture that led to the publication of the book L’architetto fuori di sé (in the Prototipi series, 1982). She then elaborated on these ideas in conferences and seminars in Strasbourg, Nancy, Berlin, La Coruña, Granada, Barcelona. Her theoretical thinking engaged  with a rich professional experience that included the construction of buildings and interior renovation projects as well as participation in design competitions. She then extended her investigation of the creative process to the crisis of the modern city, embodying it in the ideas published in Autenticità e progetto (Jaca Book, 2006).

Marta died in Rome on 9 April 2008.