Raffaele Contigiani (1920–2008) was an Italian

architect An architect is a person who plans, designs and oversees the construction of buildings. To practice architecture means to provide services in connection with the design of buildings and the space within the site surrounding the buildings that h ...

and painter. He qualified as an architect in 1947 and designed

pavilions In architecture, ''pavilion'' has several meanings: * It may be a subsidiary building that is either positioned separately or as an attachment to a main building. Often it is associated with pleasure. In palaces and traditional mansions of Asia ...

for the Italian Chamber of Commerce in the 1950s and 1960s. He was a consultant for the Italian television broadcaster

RAI RAI – Radiotelevisione italiana (; commercially styled as Rai since 2000; known until 1954 as Radio Audizioni Italiane) is the national public broadcasting company of Italy, owned by the Ministry of Economy and Finance. RAI operates many ter ...

in the 1960s but is best known for his design for

Hotel du Lac ''Hotel du Lac'' is a 1984 in literature, 1984 Booker Prize-winning novel by United Kingdom, English writer Anita Brookner. It centres on Edith Hope, a romance novelist who is staying in a hotel on the shores of Lake Geneva. There she meets o ...

(1970–1973) in

Tunis ''Tounsi'' french: Tunisois , population_note = , population_urban = , population_metro = 2658816 , population_density_km2 = , timezone1 = CET , utc_offset1 ...

which he designed in the brutalist style.

Early life

Contigiani was born in

Turin Turin ( , Piedmontese language, Piedmontese: ; it, Torino ) is a city and an important business and cultural centre in Northern Italy. It is the capital city of Piedmont and of the Metropolitan City of Turin, and was the first Italian capital ...

in 1920. He served in the military during the

Second World War World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

and was a prisoner of war in Germany.Raffaele Contigiani.
Arab Center for Architecture. Retrieved 14 April 2019.

Career

Contigiani qualified as an architect from the Faculty of Architecture at Rome in 1947. He designed buildings in Italy, Eastern Europe, and in North Africa. Among these were

for the Italian Chamber of Commerce in Libya and Tunisia in the 1950s and three at the Zagreb trade fair in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He was a consultant to the Italian television broadcaster RAI and with Mario de Renzi and Renato Avolio de Martino designed the RAI Auditorium in Naples which was built between 1958 and 1963."Il recupero dell’ Auditorium RAI di Napoli"
Alessandro Pergoli Campanelli, ''L'Architetto Italiano'', II, 16, 2006, pp. 108-111. Among his notable works is the Hotel du Lac in Tunis (1970–1974) which he designed in a brutalist style and has been seen as symbolic of the modernisation of Tunisia in the 1970s.
Kieron Monks, CNN, 25 March 2019. Retrieved 14 April 2019. Its distinctive shape has been described as the inspiration for the

sandcrawler The sandcrawler is a fictional transport vehicle in the '' Star Wars'' universe that is found on the desert planet Tatooine. The vehicle, as it appears in its major appearances in '' Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope'', is 37 meters long and 18 me ...

vehicle of the ''Star Wars'' films, as significant parts of the first trilogy were filmed in the country. However, British director and set designer Roger Christian has said that the sandcrawler was designed by

Ralph McQuarrie Ralph Angus McQuarrie (; June 13, 1929 – March 3, 2012) was an American conceptual designer and illustrator. His career included work on the original ''Star Wars'' trilogy, the original ''Battlestar Galactica'' television series, the film '' ...

before ''Star Wars'' director

George Lucas George Walton Lucas Jr. (born May 14, 1944) is an American filmmaker. Lucas is best known for creating the ''Star Wars'' and ''Indiana Jones'' franchises and founding Lucasfilm, LucasArts, Industrial Light & Magic and THX. He served as chairm ...

visited Tunisia. As of April 2019, the hotel is unoccupied and being considered for demolition.The mystery of Star Wars and Tunisia's rundown Brutalist hotel.
Neil Arun, BBC News, 10 April 2019. Retrieved 14 April 2019. Contigiani also painted scenes from prisoner of war camps in Germany and published a number of collections of his paintings.

Death

Contigiani died in 2008.

Selected publications

* ''Ecologia e Urbanistica''. Edizioni Mediterranee, Rome, 1978. (Paintings) * ''Invito Alla Bici''. Edizioni Mediterranee, Rome, 1981. (Paintings)

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Contigiani, Raffaele 1920 births 2008 deaths Architects from Turin 20th-century Italian architects Brutalist architects Italian prisoners of war 20th-century Italian painters 20th-century Italian male artists Painters from Turin