Yves Ambroset passed away on November 4. Yves was an exceptional personality who courageously and relentlessly pursued his own personal path. Born in 1958 in Talange, Moselle, he studied at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Lorraine in Nancy between 1976 and 1979, before training to become a primary school teacher between 1981 and 1984, a profession he exercised until 1987. That was the year of one of the most radical changes in his life: he began a new career as director of a trading company. This experience marked his encounter with design.
In 2002, at the age of 44, he enrolled at the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Normandie (ENSA Normandy), graduating in 2006 with a degree and a final project that was awarded a grade of "very good" and published in a Cahier deEnsa Normandie. It was during this period of study that Yves visited Piedmont, where he met Italian architect and designer Angelo Mangiarotti (1921-2012). This encounter would prove to be a decisive moment in his career. He based his fourth-year research project, Les dynamiques à l’œuvre dans la genèse des formes d’Angelo Mangiarotti (The dynamics at work in the genesis of Angelo Mangiarotti's forms), on Mangiarotti's work. After obtaining his architecture degree and his license to practice as a project manager in his own name, he worked as an architect in France and in 2010 founded "La Manufacture d'Architecture" with Swanhild Brisset and Paterne Bulcourt.
His interest in architecture, in the work of Angelo Mangiarotti and in Italy never left him. In 2008, he spoke at a conference in Canelli on the recognition of the Langhe region of Piedmont as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. He then bought a house in Italy, in Alice Bel Colle, to make it his permanent home. It was then that he set up his own agency, Bottega di architettura. In 2007, he began buying documents and original works by Mangiarotti to build up his own personal collection. On Mangiarotti's death in 2012, he approached the Angelo Mangiarotti Foundation set up by the heirs, and became a member of the Scientific Committee. Between 2012 and 2018, together with Mangiarotti's daughter Anne and the Swiss architecture critic François Burkhardt, he developed a project for an exhibition on Mangiarotti, which was later proposed to the Centre Pompidou in Metz, the Moma in New York and the Mak in Vienna, but the time was not yet ripe for its realization.
Then, yet another turn of events shook up his life. In 2018, at the age of sixty, he passed the entrance exam for the coveted and prestigious Doctorat de recherche en Storia dell'architettura at the Istituto universitario di architettura di Venezia. Unsurprisingly, his research project concerned the figure of Angelo Mangiarotti, whose work he knew perfectly well and to whose archive he had access. The thesis, entitled Angelo Mangiarotti il film e i manoscritti. Impatto del primo periodo 1943-1955 nella formazione intellettuale e progettuale dell'architetto, was supervised by Professors Maria Bonaiti and Marco Mulazzani. During his doctoral research, Yves never stopped looking for leads, interviewing the personalities with whom Mangiarotti had come into contact and following the trail of documents missing from the Foundation's Historical Archive. Thus, during his doctoral research, Yves found a document thought to have been lost, the film that Mangiarotti had conceived and shot in 1953, Posizione dell'architettura, with music by Riccardo Malipiero and lyrics by Alfonso Gatto. Although still a doctoral student, he had become a leading figure in Italian studies of Mangiarotti. Together with Federico Bucci, he is responsible for the historical archives section of the exhibition Angelo Mangiarotti e l'immaginazione politecnica: opere inedite e ritrovate at the Politecnico di Milano (curated by Ingrid Paoletti, Matteo Ruta and Maria Pilar Vettori, April-May 2023).
On May 15, 2023, he organized a remarkable "Journée d'étude Intorno a "Posizione dell'architettura", with a screening of the film retrouvé. In preparation for the forthcoming defense of his thesis, Yves had sent an article on Mangiarotti to the Cahiers de la recherche architecturale, urbaine et paysagère; we can only hope that, although posthumous, this article will find its way to publication. Unfortunately, with his untimely death, the planned presentation of his doctoral work at a seminar at the École d'architecture de Normandie, which had been under consideration since last spring, will not take place...
Valter Balducci
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