Professional activity
Marta Lonzi worked on significant commissions for the design of buildings, architectural restructuring and restoration projects, and product designs in Italy and abroad for a solid circle of clients, most of them procured through family ties and friendships in the progressive and intellectual milieu, as well as artistic circles. In Rome, she revamped the interiors of the premises of the future Fondazione Basso (from 1973) and of the Associazione Italia-URSS (1974-75); the projects of the first shops at the Città del Sole (founded by Carlo Basso, the husband of her sister Lidia) in Rome, Milan, Florence (1973-77); apartments for the artist Lydia Sansoni in Venice and Milan (1980-81); for the politicians Mondino (1989-91) in Turin and Pumilia in Palermo (1991-93); the contacts with Ludovico Corrao...
She expressed her design in buildings sensitive to the setting, such as the villa at Fetovaia (Elba, 1969) and the factory in the plain of Campidanu (1973-74), or works with minimal environmental costs, such as the Villa Turrini-Meteori at Sasso Marconi (1988-93). But it was in the renovations and designs of interiors that she found the opportunities to devise original and functional solutions, starting from the inventions she experimented with in the family apartment in Piazzale Belle Arti in Rome (1972-73). Thus, again in Rome, the artist’s studio in Via Margutta (1979-81); the apartment in Untere Viaduktgasse (1978-84) and the renovation of the Placzek office in the historic center of Vienna (1984-85); the works mentioned above in Turin and Palermo, and Casa Basso in Lerici (1993-98).
The design and restructuring of a BIEG store in East Berlin (1985-86) was one of the rare examples of interior architecture and design in East Germany to be conducted by a practice and workers from the West, when the Berlin Wall was still standing.
In 1986 she began to produce a series of furnishings, lamps and objects under the Antithesis brand, some of them made for the renovation of houses and offices, and opened the gallery of the same name in Rome.
“For me, designing always means looking for a real relationship with the client and when I say a real relationship I mean a human relationship, not a cultural relationship. For this reason, I do not recognise any dichotomy between interior architecture and exterior architecture. It is only a question of different scales of intervention, but the relationship I seek with the setting, with the pre-existing, is similar to what I want to establish with the client.” (ML 1984)
Listen to: “This is how I chose architecture”.
