What we encounter in Carbuta – a Ligurian inland village nestled quietly among its woods, frogs, and wild boars, just hopeful to be left undisturbed – is the story of a second chapter. And to tell this story, we find the the house of an architect-painter that certainly doesn’t go unnoticed.
Mario Galvagni and his relationship with Liguria, in fact, are precisely one of these multi-chapter stories. A Milanese designer who began his career with Gio Ponti, Galvagni, still very young, was commissioned by entrepreneur Pierino Tizzoni (the same behind Costa Paradiso in Sardinia) to create one of the milestones of Ligurian holiday modernism: the residential development of Torre del Mare in Bergeggi

When construction wrapped up in 1959 on dozens of homes along the promontory, Galvagni also formally declared the end of his Ligurian chapter.
But beyond the statements, that’s not how things went at all.

Once far from his large-scale masterpiece – and being, before even an architect, a painter trained at the Brera Academy, and later also a physicist – Galvagni entered a new phase in which his relationship with Liguria, its coast, and its inland areas became not only architectural, but biographical. In the late ’60s, he built another house in Bergeggi; but in the meanwhile, in the hills around Calice Ligure, inland from Finale, a whole constellation of art world figures was beginning to gather – gallerists like Renato Pastori, artists such as Emilio Scanavino, Carlo Nangeroni, Paolo Icaro, and Nanda Vigo – a kind of community pop-up in the hills that would go on to make history, even hosting Andy Warhol at one point.

Galvagni was connected to this network, and immersed in a prolific period of painting. Alongside his Swiss artist wife, Corina Steinrisser, he decided to establish a home-studio in the hills around Calice. In 1968, he purchased an old farmhouse, a former olive press, and transformed it into a deeply personal and idiosyncratic exploration of space and the human presence within the landscape, one that defied easy categorization as modernist, organic, or brutalist.

Gradually, this vernacular structure took on surrealist overtones. Large sculptural “ears” appeared on the façades, soon iconic, which the architect would describe as “light conductors”. These protrusions extended the openings, framed with wire mesh coated in cement – not so different from Pier Luigi Nervi’s ferrocement – and were calibrated to track the sun’s path, channeling isolated rays into the otherwise dim interior spaces.

Francesca Olivieri

These light conductors are not just windows – you can look through them, enter and exit through them. In the garden, forms play an even greater role. “Doors” sit suspended 20 centimeters above the ground; stepping out requires placing your foot on a stone embedded in a concrete disc. These discs multiply across the garden parterre, organized by low retaining walls and anchored by a circular table with concrete benches: an orchestration of form and generative lines.

For Galvagni, this was a new phase of his lifelong investigation into formal matrices: compositional codes where the rigor of modular geometric patterns could shape not only buildings but entire worlds, inside and out. This thinking defined his designs at Torre del Mare and the villas in Inveruno on the Ticino plain while, a few years later, similar ideas would reemerge in the work of Peter Eisenman. However esoteric Galvagni’s own explanations may have been, the Carbuta house embodies his concept of a “form ecology” (ecologia della forma): the belief that a kind of genetic code drives humans to shape forms as an expression of a natural interaction with their environment.

In Carbuta, it’s the high inland countryside overlooking the Mediterranean that becomes the partner in this human dialogue. By relocating part of his life and work there, Galvagni explored the roots of his formal matrix in the hands-on creativity of rural life, an almost anthropological stance that became central to his research into interaction, transcending any divide between painter and architect.

Francesca Olivieri, an architect who has recently studied Galvagni’s work in depth, describes how even after the peak of Calice’s artistic moment faded, Galvagni remained focused on the land: on the terraced fields, on those who shaped and inhabited them, and on the tension between staying and leaving for the promise of cities. With this rural community, he would go on to even create a theater production in the late 1970s, and paintings he would later donate to the village.

We’re talking about someone who seemed determined to live out the theories he proposed: “Wherever he went, he created something, from anything, with anything”, his daughter Martina Galvagni recalls. Like the portholes salvaged from decommissioned ships, repurposed as windows. Or the endless new forms deposited in and around the Carbuta house, by both Galvagni and his wife Corina, who long maintained her studio there.

Actually, this Galvagni chapter was never closed for good. Mario Galvagni passed away in April 2020, leaving behind a studio full of unfinished paintings he was working on up until just days before. He also left behind unfinished essays attempting to formalize his theories and a paper finally accepted by the journal of the Italian Physics Society (SIF), of which he was a member.

The house in Carbuta, perched high in a Ligurian valley, may be the clearest intersection of all his multiple trajectories, a deeply personal, and yet oddly universal, architecture. It tells not just the story of Galvagni’s singular path, but also those of the artists he crossed paths with in Calice, and of the landscape that continues to resonate through its terrain, through its people, and through those large concrete ears still catching the light.