Gianandrea Barreca has died at 57. He was among the architects who most clearly helped shift the way Milan – and several other European cities – has been imagined, working from a consistent idea of architecture as relation: between building and nature, design and urban fabric, research, teaching and the contemporary landscape.

He died in his home in Bogliasco, near Genoa, where he was born. In 1993, in his hometown, he co-founded Gruppo A12, a research collective focused on the overlap between art and urban space.

Milan later became the centre of his professional trajectory. In 1999 he joined Boeri Studio with Stefano Boeri and Giovanni La Varra: there began a partnership with La Varra that would last nearly three decades, and there projects took shape that redefined how architecture, nature and the city can be imagined together. The Bosco Verticale in Porta Nuova – with its towers hosting hundreds of trees – became an international reference point and one of the defining images of contemporary Milan. Another key work was Villa Méditerranée in Marseille, with its dramatic cantilever projecting over the harbour at the foot of Fort Saint-Jean, where architecture engages directly with the urban landscape.

In 2008 he co-founded Barreca & La Varra, a practice centred on housing and the city, while keeping the relationship between built form and landscape as a constant design driver. From this approach came projects such as 5Square, the social housing development facing Milan’s Parco Agricolo Sud, and the Symbiosis Campus in Porta Romana, both examples of a design attitude attentive to how architecture connects, with environment the former and with education the latter.

Alongside practice, Barreca maintained a strong academic and cultural role. He was master’s director at Domus Academy, taught in Genoa and Pavia, and advised institutions.

What remains is the work of an architect who consistently combined vision with a strong sense of context, contributing to a renewed idea of the city and leaving a mark on Milan and contemporary Italian architecture that is hard to overlook.