Livio Vacchini is one of the most important exponents of Ticino architecture, a style which has been claiming worldwide attention over the last two decades. Of these, Vacchini has been the most consequent, developing for his buildings an individualized and elegant architectural language - a language characterized by symmetry, monumentality in small, formal severity and a focus on essentials.

Tributes to classic modern architecture, especially to the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe and Louis I. Kahn are clear, as are references to the primal stone architecture of Tessin.

1. "It is impossible to work on a concept without realizing that this concept is the consequence of a different idea which, by the same token, has taken its form from a yet earlier idea" - thus Vacchini on the process of transformation. The dynamics of this transformation leave a stamp on his disciplined, rational working method and also on the quality of his nearly classicistic buildings in their urban or country settings.

This is the first comprehensive monograph to Livio Vacchini. With the close cooperation of the architect, it shows his development over the past 25 years - from his own residence in Ascona (1969) and the primary school in Locarno (1970-1978) to the community apartments in Paris (1992-) and the New School of Architecture in Nancy (1993-).