Liliana Grassi Biography
Liliana Grassi (Milan, 1 April 1923 – Milan, 10 August 1985) was an Italian architect, architectural historian and academic, restoration theorist. Born in Milan 1923 to Agide Grassi, employed at the Falk steelworks in Sesto San Giovanni, and Maria Vanoli.[1] After graduating from the Royal Carlo Tenca Masters Institute in Milan, she also obtained an artistic maturity and was thus able to enroll in the Faculty of Architecture at the Polytechnic of Milan, where she graduated in 1947. A student of Ambrogio Annoni, she became a voluntary assistant immediately after graduation, then becoming full assistant in 1958. Free professor of Stylistic and constructive characteristics of monuments (from 1956) and of Restoration of monuments (from 1960), she was professor of Life Drawing 1 (professor in charge from 1959) and of Restoration of monuments (professor appointed since 1960, ordinary since 1967) at the Faculty of Architecture of the Polytechnic of Milan. The crisis of the Faculty of Architecture - which began with the first student protests in 1963 - pushed Liliana Grassi to move to the Faculty of Engineering in 1972, where she taught restoration techniques until her death in the summer of 1985 and where she was director of the Institute of general design in the period 1972-82. Her design activity is linked above all to the decades-long restoration project of the Ca' Granda in Milan - seriously damaged by the bombings of the Second World War - on which she worked from 1948 to 1985 (first as Annoni's collaborator, then as manager), carrying out its reuse as the seat of the University of Milan. However, he also designed numerous other restorations of churches and palaces (especially in Milan and its surroundings) and some new construction projects, including the Church of S.Maria in Assago (completed by Maria Antonietta Crippa), completed in 1992. Liliana Grassi's design attitude was characterized on the one hand by the refusal of a "modern" completely separated from tradition" and on the other by the refusal of mimetic integration in restoration, an area in which she favored a balanced integration between ancient and modern. Liliana Grassi's research activity was closely linked to the design work on Ca' Granda - with in-depth studies on fifteenth-century Lombard architecture and on Filarete, designer of the complex - but she also dealt with broader themes of methodology of architectural historiographical research and theory of restoration. Among his main students are Amedeo Bellini, Maria Antonietta Crippa and Stefano Della Torre.
