Angelo Mangiarotti was born in Milan in 1921, and received his architecture degree in 1948 from the Politechnical University of Milan. In 1953-54 while he was a visiting professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, he participated in the architectural competition to design the city's loop. During this period Mangiarotti met Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe and Konrad Wachsmann. With architectural offices in Milan and later Tokyo, Mangiarotti spent many years as a visiting professor for such schools as the University of Hawaii, Politecnique Fédérale of Lausanne, The University of Adelaide, and finally in 1990 he returned to his Alma Mater as a visiting professor of architecture at the Politechnical University of Milan. Mangiarotti's designs attempt to uncover the intrinsic characteristic of each object, because only "objective" design can avoid misleading the user to become collectively recognizable by overcoming the individual design.