Gabriele Basilico and the careful observation of a city that no longer exists 10 years after his death, Triennale Milano dedicates a retrospective exhibition to the photographer, reminding us how to look at cities with complexity.

“I miss Gabriele, we miss him so much. I would have enjoyed seeing him look, today, at this Milan of ours. (...) And then to hear his calm voice, alternating with the unmistakable nasal puffs, commenting on his photos on the Milan of these days, where the mechanical frenzy of restarting reigns.” Architect Stefano Boeri's introduction to the exhibition Gabriele Basilico. My Cities, on show at Triennale Milano, could only be sentimental, not only because of the friendship between the two but because the photographer has been an indispensable motivation for so many architects, Italian and beyond.

Born in Milan and graduated in architecture from Milan's university par excellence, the Politecnico, Basilico made a gradual transition from architecture to photography, until the moment when the two passions collided to become one. Basilico gradually realised that architecture isn’t only about designing buildings or pieces of the city: equally essential is learning to look at it, according to a discipline that is anything but simple. No other photographer has portrayed Milan and its transformations with similar constancy, curiosity, and patience. No author has influenced as Basilico did the way we contemporary Milanese architects observe their city, its complex morphology, its stratifications, its otherness, and innumerable possibilities.

The retrospective exhibition about the maestro is divided into two sections—one dedicated to his 40-year relationship with Milan, at Triennale Milano, and the other, set up at Palazzo Reale (on view until January 7, 2024 ), with shots from the most important metropolises on the planet. We can leave out the second part because it is chaotic, poorly set up and less significant. Let us focus on the part dedicated to Milan, curated by Giovanna Calvenzi and Matteo Balduzzi. The exhibition is structured through 13 series or fields of investigation that comprehensively express his planning concerning the urban organism.

"Milan has been for me, photographically speaking, a site of experimentation," as nowhere else Basilico has worked with a breadth of themes, time at his disposal, and capacity for movement. It is not by chance the only context in which he was able and willing to work even in the absence of a direct commission. Each series explores a precise theme, more or less circumscribed topographically, a prolonged period of work and the development of an appropriate mode of representation.

In the rooms on the ground floor of Triennale Milano, we can trace Basilico's career from the beginning, inevitably immersed in the climate of social reportage, to his last and most spectacular works, in a trajectory that describes in fragments the transformation of Milan. The exhibition includes the narrative of the Milanese suburbs of the 1970s, the famous investigation dedicated to factories ("Milano Portraits of Factories"), the survey on the architecture of Milanese modernism, the project on the city at night carried out for the energy company AEM, the works for the construction of the Porta Nuova district—that of the famous Bosco Verticale—and those for the restoration of the roof of the Duomo. The exhibition layout, designed by Francesco Librizzi, is sober and elegant—like Milan before it discovered its glittering, international dimension—simple and functional in displaying the enormous amount of work produced by the photographer over 40 years.

Why is Basilico so important in the training of an architect? Because he taught us to look at the city in its layers, with complexity, paying particular attention to its most mundane parts. In an interview screened at the exhibition, the photographer says, "I have always been drawn, ever since my first work on factories, to those parts of the city that the prevailing architectural culture considered mediocre and uninteresting on the historical level. But I am interested in the city as a phenomenon, not in sequences of beautiful architecture. This means that I look at the big picture, which includes both the proclaimed and historically defined beauty and the mediocrity that no one cares about. But the horrible parts of the city if looked at carefully are not a little less horrible. To look unobtrusively, in an acceptable way, in a way that leaves room for the possibility of dialogue, in my opinion, is a bit like giving back to places a beauty they never had." For this sensitivity of his, Basilico has been recognised and called upon to portray a variety of metropolises and territories. For this ability of his, we miss him dearly.