Alexander Corazzo was born in Lyon, France. Always interested in the arts, he initially pursued a career in music, studying at the Conservatoire Nationale de Musique in Paris before immigrating to the United States in 1927. Once he began painting, his career quickly took off. He was a member of two of the most influential abstract artists’ groups of the time, the American Abstract Artist Group and the exclusive European painters’ group Abstraction-Creation. He interacted with many members of the artistic avant-garde, marrying fellow artist Gretchen Schoeninger and becoming close friends with composer John Cage.
In the late 1930s, Corazzo began to develop an interest in design and attended the “New Bauhaus” school in Chicago. He eventually went on to get his degree in architecture from the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he studied under Mies Van Der Rohe. He later went on to work for Van Der Rohe as an architect. Eventually, Corazzo stopped painting entirely, focusing exclusively on architecture.