The figure of Giuseppe Terragni (Meda, 1904 – Como, 1943), central to any understanding of the course of twentieth-century architecture, still raises many questions.

At first glance it seems, indeed, almost a prisoner of its own considerable and jagged critical fortune, in which widely differing points of view have alternated and overlapped. Today, at a greater remove in time, and thanks to the valuable work carried out in recent years by the Giuseppe Terragni Archive, which has made it possible to acquire new materials and studies, one may perhaps hold that this diversified critical history[1] is itself a further sign of the vitality of his work. That work, as often happens with the great protagonists, contains within itself such a complexity and stratification of meanings that it lends itself to interpretations that are legitimately different and at times almost opposite. Nor should it be overlooked that, in relation also to his personal circumstances and to the times he happened to live through, his output has been, depending on the generations that have engaged with it, a litmus test for resolving (or removing) unresolved problems of the national culture within the international debate.

A few knots nonetheless seem indispensable to any attempt at a reading of him – one that will be sketched here only in broad outline.

THE MODERN ALLEGIANCE

On one side, a convinced allegiance to modernity.

Emblematic in this regard are the inventiveness, the freedom and the compositional richness of his use of materials: think of glass, of glass block and of linoleum.

“(…) from the advent of reinforced concrete and of iron structures” new possibilities follow. “the windows can at last follow the shape of the rooms and tend towards the horizontal. (…) the fully glazed opening becomes the logical consequence of exploiting the possibilities of lightness and of the walls’ release from load.

Modern architects seize upon this concept, and from Lloyd Wright to Sant’Elia to Le Corbusier it is like a contest to fling open real windows in the walls, which at once become, in the metaphor, sources of a new light, of a new constructive and civic morality, doors onto nature so that, through the filter of technology, it may resume its pre-eminent place in the life of man, who had mistakenly drawn away from it”[2].

“These are the first steps towards the house of glass. We adore glass. (…) Glass reveals what it is, it cannot conceal, it is synonymous with clarity, it is the only material that is brother to light, to air, to space.

It is for this reason that we want to build the city of glass. (…) To give light, to enjoy light. Not to refuse this perfect gift of nature.

(…) And yet, illusions aside, our paradoxical programme of building cities of glass contains and spreads a principle that has by now entered the mind of public opinion: to let more light into the house. (…)

The two great revolutions of architecture: glass and steel. Two materials that need no rhetoric; nor even anti-rhetoric. (…)

Glass, which enthuses the doctors who want it in the building of their sanatoria, a tonic for bodies and minds; glass demanded by the schoolmaster, by the worker, by the peasant. Glass invoked.”[3]. So wrote Terragni in 1936 in the journal «Quadrante», which he had helped to found. Such statements were set out in his Tavole polemiche, theoretical-critical sheets centred on individual topics. To the use of glass, indeed, he devoted many reflections in those years, some of which have been reprinted precisely in the Atlante Terragni by Attilio Terragni, Daniel Libeskind and Paolo Rosselli[4]. The multiplicity of motives that accompanied the choice of glass is evident: aesthetic and ethical, technical and hygienic, metaphorical and social, in a complexity of considerations and awarenesses proper to the role of the architect[5].

In the second half of the 1920s, demands for modernity reached the young man from Como, who had graduated in Milan in 1926, from multiple sources – while he certainly felt them as a strictly personal need. Elements of the political debate too, in its more culturally sensitive quarters, put forward demands aimed at giving linguistic form to a society that wished to be obsessively new, young and modern, and at presenting a corresponding image of itself, for reasons of the self-representation of power and of propaganda, both at home and abroad. Consider, for example, Novecento and the work carried out by Margherita Sarfatti. It was to Terragni that she would entrust the most painful and heartfelt of tributes – the funerary monument for her son, killed in the war while very young – and later she would assure him of her support in the politically dangerous affairs surrounding the Casa del fascio[6]. Moreover, an effort was under way, aimed, amid many contradictions, at improving housing conditions – for example through the construction of public housing – and school building.

Meanwhile the Futurist programme itself continued, through various vicissitudes. On this point one must recall the long-standing querelle concerning the relations between the Futurist architecture of Sant’Elia and the architecture of Terragni, as well as the agreement reached on the occasion of the making of the Monument to the Fallen in Como, when Filippo Tommaso Marinetti himself intervened[7]. Although some initial premises may have been shared, Terragni’s sensibility was in many respects far from that of Sant’Elia, and his talent too original for a more fruitful comparison with so close an antecedent. In general, Sant’Elia’s remained an unfulfilled and unresolved prefiguration. Italian modern architects took another path and bypassed the questions he had raised, setting up as polarities elements that might have been in dialogue.

The image of Italian society (and of the Fascist regime) had to be suitably modern, conveying a substantial discontinuity with the preceding decades. At that point in time, the Umbertine idiom perhaps seemed the most backward-looking thing there could be, while certain stylistic features drawn from Art Nouveau had, moreover, rapidly aged, swept away in part by the First World War as well. It is rather, then, an entirely new language – that of the Modern Movement and in particular of Rationalism – that gives incisive expression to representational and functional needs that were equally new.

Terragni engages with this emerging language from his very first works.

AN ARTICULATED NATIONAL PROBLEM/1

It should be noted that this was a primarily international language – significant that it was carried forward in different national contexts; that it was at times presented at the great international exhibitions; that its authors gathered in deliberately international bodies (such as, for example, CIAM).

A national problem thus implicitly arises. An indispensable knot, but a slippery and ambiguous one. On one hand, clear and exemplary achievements in the new language allowed Italian architecture to add its voice to this innovative and forward-looking concert; on the other, Terragni offers an interpretation of it deeply bound to territorial concerns yet always fruitfully removed both from any vernacular temptation and from explicit, supposedly national canons, which in the long run might have proved short of breath. Indeed, of the national problem Terragni was to some extent also a victim, in life and in death.

THE ANTI-RHETORICAL RELATION WITH ANTIQUITY

Intrinsic to the modern vocation there appears an underlying and foundational reflection on tradition.

Here again the poetics of materials will come to our aid: think of marble.

“3,016 square metres of slabs of various thicknesses (from 6 cm down to 2) rest upon the perimeter walls, sheathing in a layer of marble every visible part of the building. This cladding is not to be understood as a decorative gesture, but as a practical necessity, and as a “problem solved”. Italy, extraordinarily rich in natural stone (limestones, saccharoidal marbles, gneisses, granites, breccias and so on), is in the fortunate position of being able to offer its modern architects the convenient solution (compared with the cost of certain crushed-stone facings used abroad) to the problem of the great, bare walls that the rigorous exegesis of modern architecture demands in our buildings.”[8]. Words penned by the architect apropos of the Casa del fascio, in which marble is adopted as a cladding material both outside (“with no projection whatever” writes the author, who also notes its extraordinary capacity to resist the elements) and inside, whether for practical ends, where greater use is envisaged, or for aesthetic ends, as the shrewd and sparing internal use of colour demonstrates.

No nationalism, in any case: the architectural result amply demonstrates as much and, were that not enough, so do the polemics that levelled at him the charge of a taste for all things foreign. What is evident, rather, is his attention and love for the landscape, both natural and man-made, inseparably uniting, as architecture teaches us, the practical plane and theoretical choices.

A comparison is useful with the use of this material in tradition, already the classical and then, for instance, the Renaissance tradition. Bearing in mind the use Terragni makes of it, in the Casa del fascio in Como and afterwards, one sees the reinvention of the material that the architect brings about, within an overall modernity that clashes entirely with the certainly emphatic and quotation-laden use of E42, which was in any case some years later. In the meantime, moreover, a hardening had set in of the official positions, which had turned traditionalist and rhetorical – bypassing the problem of an authentic and fruitful relation with tradition, a problem raised by our architect – and in the meantime, not by chance, a considerable conflict had arisen between the architect and the more official, governmental circles.

The use of marble, a noble and allusive material, could well serve as a key to reading his entire relation with tradition and in particular with antiquity.

These are elements of great prominence for a reading, upstream and downstream, of the Casa del fascio, and also for understanding the polemics that flared up after it was built.

From the 1920s onwards the Fascist regime put forward an instrumental use of the Roman past, working a political and totalitarian abuse of the archaeological remains present on national soil and inserting into its own symbolic programme numerous elements drawn in particular from the imperial legacy, arbitrarily called upon to embody within itself the whole of classicity. Overstepping the actual historical data, there arose an antiquity that was largely forced, and that formed part of numerous architectural and decorative undertakings intended for public use. In these complexes the symbols of the regime appeared interwoven with those of antiquity, deriving from them an ahistorical and supra-temporal legitimation while at the same time suggesting the impression of a substantial continuity. The systematic use of ancient vestiges for the symbolic consolidation of its own power, and in the search for a falsely historical legitimation of its dominion, both domestic and colonial, was thus directed towards nationalistic ends. Town planning, architecture, art, political oratory and the instruments of mass enculturation converge in the perception and creation of a Roman and imperial myth. Already in the second half of the 1920s this process is clearly under way, though countered by the reflections and method of figures such as Lionello Venturi and Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli[9]. It was, however, above all the political and cultural developments of the 1930s that systematised it. In those years, then, certain great campaigns are launched in which iconographic programmes are adopted that allude, in a symbolic function, to the glorious past of Rome and take in the political and symbolic iconography of the regime[10]. Among the great decorative undertakings of the 1930s one may cite in passing, given our territorial relevance, Dottori’s fresco La luce dell’antica madre at the University for Foreigners of Perugia, of 1937[11].

Faced with this relation to antiquity, Terragni takes up an emblematic element of it, marble, and transforms it into a modern material; indeed, a contemporary one. The choice on the square-facing front of the Casa del fascio is symptomatic: marble, “with no projection”, becomes a neutral surface, to the point of the status of a pure screen. A dazzling choice, which qualifies as backdrop the ancient material so laden with symbols – and perhaps also an ironic reversal of the impulses that instrumentalised antiquity. Far from becoming a monument to itself, a fetish of a pseudo-antiquity offered up for worship, marble becomes so available to new interpretations that it can be resemanticised even as a wall – Nizzoli’s works were planned for it – or as a projection screen. The pure surface, put forward by the modern “rigorous exegesis”, presents new characteristics, useful for unimagined uses. Thus the rhetorical relation with antiquity – imperial and nationalistic – is eroded from within, and there opens up instead a relation of freedom and subversion, starting from that very historical substance of a supranational koinè that antiquity evidently possessed. The words cited supra, by the architect himself, shrewdly trace the modern use of marble back on one hand to a national building tradition (as against purely imitative choices), on another to the ready and economical availability of materials, in wide choice, and on yet another to constructive and functional characteristics, avoiding the trap of an ideological overload and also of alluding, for instance, to the Mediterranean myth that was after all dear to Le Corbusier himself – see what Zevi would write on Le Corbusier, but apropos of Terragni, many years later[12].

THE POLEMICS OVER THE CASA DEL FASCIO AND TERRAGNI’S COMPLICATED POSITIONING

That these were “sensitive topics” is shown by the very first symptoms of the polemic over the Casa del fascio, of which we have an intense “behind the scenes” in the relevant correspondence between Alberto Sartoris and the architect[13]. A first spark to the powder may have been an intervention by Ugo Ojetti, who praised[14] the Italian Pavilion at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1937, signed by Marcello Piacentini, foremost exponent of official architecture, with Pagano and Valle. Ojetti’s comparison with the Septizodium of Septimius Severus was in fact meant as praise. Soon afterwards there arose the polemical, but above all defamatory, campaign against Terragni, who was even accused (anonymously) of plagiarising the old people’s home by Otto Haesler in Kassel, of 1932, and the “Vesna” homemaking school in Brno, by Bohuslav Fuchs, of 1930; two buildings, one German and the other “Bolshevik”, which translated the charge of scant originality into one of a failure of nationalism. The counter-offensive, prompt and well-judged and later shown to be victorious, was launched by Terragni and Sartoris, beginning with Pier Maria Bardi’s article Le fonti della fantasia[15], which cited the Casa del fascio as a further inspiration for the Paris pavilion. It is significant to observe that the link with the Exposition would come into play again with Piacentini’s remonstrances, reported verbally by Bontempelli to Terragni[16], but aimed at accusing Sartoris, guilty, in his telling, of an attempt to boycott the Italian Pavilion. Piacentini’s relation with antiquity (blended with Rationalism) unfolded through various phases and modes[17]; and yet, if in the making of the Italian pavilions it was already long-standing practice to allude to the architectural glories of the national past – a practice that could nonetheless be broken – and the choice of Piacentini, Pagano and Valle thus stood in the furrow of a tradition dating back to the Italian presence at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1867[18], that specific antiquity, in whose key the Pavilion was chosen to be read, was a clear message. The very subtlety – decisive – of the differences became a burning allusion.

A (INTER)NATIONAL PROBLEM/2. RETHINKING RATIONALISM

The exemplary clarity, the modern beauty, the complexity and functionality of the Casa del fascio, which had after all made use of traditional materials too – which was, at bottom, made of pure white marble – struck people forcibly, prompting an attack almost without precedent in virulence and organisation. A building that made of the grandiloquence of the façade, at least in part, a screen, that called into question the hierarchical pre-eminence of the main front by constructing four façades – a four-dimensional truth, one might say today – evidently put in question both the Septizodium and the Colosseums – and we shall again cite Dottori’s Perugian fresco – as well as the (coming) square colosseums. Refusing, moreover, a scenographic performativity or a direct vernacular relation – themes likewise inherent in the place itself, with which it prefers to establish a free dialogue – and deliberately bypassing forms of modularity or hierarchical articulations of the fronts, that extraordinary architecture pulverised many buildings written in the same language in Italy and departed decisively even from the international prototypes, such as Le Corbusier himself, in whose case both the modularity and the tendentially classicising purist temptations were called into question, while the diktat of the structure clearly legible on the façade, or in any case from outside, fell away. Even at the time, certain distinctions appeared evident, and sometimes the very criticisms, often dishonest, like those just cited, ended up clarifying, through their rage and speciousness, some fundamental things; today, however, the internal articulation of a continent as vast as the modern architectural language was appears more incontrovertible.

In those years, perhaps, to be or not to be was principally a matter of allegiance to the Modern Movement; but later there came authorial re-readings that put forward interpretive hypotheses often illuminating. Among these, one that deserves mention is that of Bruno Zevi, who in 1980 devoted a brief and intense monograph to the architect from Como[19]. Commendably, Zevi re-reads Terragni in terms of a Mannerist, and in particular Michelangelesque, inspiration and conspiracy. Starting from Terragni’s interests during his years of study and from numerous sketches found among his papers, the architectural historian, who in 1964 had curated at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni an important exhibition on Michelangelo the architect, draws a parallel between Michelangelo’s tormented religious sensibility and Terragni’s relation of allegiance and dissent towards his own time. (A few years earlier Achille Bonito Oliva, albeit in another direction, had summed up in the artists of Mannerism the figure of the artist in general[20]). In any case, re-reading Terragni in the key of a relation with tradition, but with a particular kind of tradition, had the great merit of freeing him from the bond, substantially present but misleading if considered pre-eminent, with the Rationalism of his own day. Zevi thus takes on the task of bringing to light his profound connections with the tradition of sixteenth-century architecture and with Michelangelo in particular. This is another sense of the relation with Rome, as against the one ever more forcefully put forward by the regime. The architect’s sensibility in the later 1920s and the full 1930s turns instead to an acute and underlying engagement with tradition, an engagement anything but imitative or monumentalising, but bent on recovering and studying concrete elements of architectural grammar as, on the whole, a spirit and a measure still useful for resolving the problems of building and dwelling – and human destinies. Within the relation with tradition, and alongside the study of antiquity (in an Egyptian, Greek, Roman key, to cite his writings), his attention to Renaissance architecture is systematic; of it, already in defending the project for the refurbishment of the Albergo Metropole Suisse in Como, a still very young Terragni cites many examples[21]. At the chronological juncture of 1980, Zevi, in proposing a Michelangelesque and post-Mannerist Terragni, perhaps grasped some underlying elements of his working. In any case, certainly, if that operation served in some respects to detach his trajectory, not in an ahistorical sense from concrete events and occasions, which he certainly shared and felt, but from a historical horizon that sustains and motivates him without thereby exhausting him, in other respects, by freeing him from the immediate bond with his epoch, it cleared the field of a misunderstanding, correctly relocating him in the furrow of the great tradition and leaving him free for possible new readings. The interpretation by Manfredo Tafuri, woven also of philosophy and literature, of very few years before[22], though substantially different, made an attempt that was at bottom convergent. It thus became clear that the links with Rationalism, certainly present and also dictated by the very new technical possibilities, were not, however, decisive. It became clearer than before that, within the continent of the Modern Movement, there were very different personalities, and that relations with the past could usefully be adduced to clarify such differences. On that basis too we may today feel free to call Terragni a heterodox Rationalist, or even firmly to dispute his belonging to that current. Mies or Gropius seem to us substantially far from his solutions[23] – different, in my view, in part, is the case of Le Corbusier[24], though he too is distant. The powerful sense of the masses, the curved lines and the torsions of the interior spaces, which recall Michelangelesque composition and certain Roman movements, are indeed important in works from the Novocomum onwards. Certainly, the operations, opposite yet convergent, of Tafuri and of Zevi have allowed us to bring to the surface other possible readings and to “de-Rationalise”, or at least to rethink, the Rationalist belonging of his architecture (Tafuri spoke of a suspended identity[25]), constituting a platform onto which to graft new lessons. Zevi, precisely, points out, thanks also to a philological analysis of the editorial history of the projects and of the sketchbooks, the foundational relation with tradition. That relation with Humanism-Renaissance can be re-read today – not in the specifics but methodologically – with the important indications of Massimo Cacciari’s intense essay La mente inquieta [26], devoted precisely to Manfredo Tafuri, and which in its own way can be read as an operation of national pedagogy.

SOME PROJECTS AND WORKS

In the too-brief span of his existence Terragni devoted almost all his energies to architecture. Of him there remain some eighty projects, often carried forward in parallel. The earliest known are the so-called Project for Casa Saibene of 1925-26 and the one for the first- and second-stage competition for the Monument to the Fallen in Como (with Pietro Lingeri and the sculptors G. Mozzanica and G. B. Tedeschi) of 1925-26; the last is the Project for a cathedral of 1943. Among the many works, all of enormous importance, we shall analyse, for brevity, only a few, distributed chronologically across his career.

THE NOVOCOMUM IN COMO

The first project to be built, after the refurbishment of the Albergo Metropole Suisse, was the Novocomum, in Como, in 1927-29. Getting around the meshes of the rather conservative building commissions, the architect radically altered the project already approved and produced a building of great originality and inventiveness. Exhibited at the shows of rational architecture, from that of 1928 onwards, it was considered, together with Pagano’s Casa Gualino, the first Italian Rationalist work. Le Corbusian echoes could be caught in this apartment house, which was promptly rechristened the Transatlantico, the ocean liner. Of large dimensions, it has a very long front of more than 60 metres. Its form is made animated both by the beautiful invention of the cylindrical glass towers, which in effect replace the corners, and by the expressive power of the colour, which plays a leading role. From a distance one senses a Mendelsohnian, Expressionist influence – perhaps corrected in the light of a greater weight of the volumetric masses – while a relation with Constructivism appears debatable. Zevi, who interprets the Novocomum in this key, writes: (the architect favours) “the hollowed-out corners, where glass cylinders nestle which, bitten into at the second floor, leave the fifth suspended in the void. Thus are interwoven the etymons of German Expressionism and of Soviet Constructivism. In this season of impetuous creativity, Terragni is not content with the Rationalist methods of Le Corbusier, Gropius, Mies and Oud. He tears the pure stereometries, biting into their edges, that is, the nodes at which the façade moves in order to win, through a non-finito, volumetric depth.”. In a not-distant direction the Novocomum had already, at the time, been (problematically) likened to a work by Golosov as well. Pagano, cited also by Ciucci[27], by contrast rightly extolled in 1930 the compositional use of colour. Persico alone[28], departing in this case too from the interpretive vulgate, instead assigned to the building a strong dialogue with the climate of Novecento, in which the architect, who was also a painter, exhibited.

THE CASA DEL FASCIO IN COMO

“A milestone of modern European architecture. This work unfolds the creative fragrance of Terragni (…) A perfect prism, square plan with a side of 33.20 m and a height of 16.60 m. (…) A layout rigid from the outset, such as to provoke a fierce travail to burn away its classicist potentials. Square and prism are indeed canons of Corbusian purism, but here that purism is contested, since the volume is not suspended on pilotis and the façades are not free with respect to the structural frame; rather, they involve themselves in it so as to extract from it a stratified depth. The suction of the atrium and the breakthrough onto the sky guarantee the transparency of the block.” writes Zevi[29].

If the Novocomum had marked the authoritative entry of the very young author (twenty-three years old) into the modern architectural assembly, the Casa del Fascio, of 1932-1936, marks an in part unforeseeable development. The Le Corbusian suggestions are certainly present, but precisely revisited in reverse.

More than elsewhere, moreover, the equivalence between Rationalism and functionalism is called into question here. A misconception definitively dispelled, in historiographical terms, by Giulio Carlo Argan, at the conference devoted in 1968 to L’eredità di Giuseppe Terragni, organised by Zevi. Argan stresses, on that occasion, “…the importance that the research on the indivisible, afunctional formal unity holds in Terragni’s work: typical cases are the tomb and the monument. It is a pure research, almost of the laboratory, on the direct comparison, on an equal footing, of the ancient and the modern, without the current and arbitrary identification of the ancient with the beautiful and of the modern with the useful.”[30]. The studies on Rationalist architecture constituted, on close inspection, a chapter, or rather a phase, of Argan’s operation of national pedagogy[31], interwoven with his adherence to history, sub specie of art history, and then with the (further) writing of the celebrated manual and with university teaching. Argan writes, significantly, at the end of a period that was pivotal for him and for the destinies of the arts, not only the national ones[32], in the aftermath, moreover, of the waning of his hypothesis of the artist-designer, as integral planner of the real, capable of replacing the earlier and declining status of the artist[33]. It must be said that, in a less metaphorical way, and within the field of architecture, such a figure had in some sense been foreshadowed in Italy by Terragni himself, who in fact designed both the buildings, in every detail and integrated with artistic research, and the furnishings. Let it be added that Argan, of the Venturian genealogy, had had an early career and had frequented circles close to the protagonist himself, grasping the clash that ripened between Pagano and Terragni “from within” «Casabella», as Giorgio Ciucci recalls[34]. Taking up some elements of Argan’s interpretation, Ciucci clears the field of overbearing labels, tracing Terragni’s architecture back to recurrent forms: “cylinders and angular projecting volumes, round and squared, to mark the dynamic relation between new architecture and renewed urban image (not yet structure); (…) Thus, a Terragni (…) in search, Argan is right, of a functionality of form with symbolic value. A search that pushes as far as the impalpable image of the transparency and luminosity exalted in the Vitrum shop or in the Casa del fascio in Como or in the Asilo Sant’Elia”. And, regarding the Casa del fascio, he stresses the: “symbolic contents… manifested with illuminating clarity and in maximally simplified forms. (…) In the Casa del fascio, resolved architecturally into a compact and harmonious volume, one can grasp the idea of rotary movement (…) here it is enclosed in the sequence of the four façades, bound to one another by a consequential yet mutable recurrence of the structural grid of beams and pillars, articulated into solid surfaces and voids that expand them into a three-dimensional grid. The bond between the four fronts is perceived by rotating around the building, coming thus to read in linear sequence the different formal solutions: at the corners, the play of solids and voids not only defines the passage from one front to another but at the same time gives each front autonomy with respect to the volume (…) inside, in the roof of the great central double-height hall, one grasps a ‘fifth façade’ crossed along its whole length by a horizontal ribbon window through which the sky is seen.”.

The visitor, but also the mere passer-by, notwithstanding the extremely harmonious form (whose reasons we have seen, with Zevi), are perceptually and subtly invited to keep their senses and attention alert. Walking around it or passing nearby, and all the more so observing the building and entering it, a sense of unpredictability and surprise, never an end in itself, incites the critical sense. The four-dimensional truth of the fronts of the Casa del fascio reveals not only the modernity of this exemplary text but also a burning contemporaneity.

In the methodological direction of an architecture-as-text, Peter Eisenman, in various writings[35], has written decisive pages, later positioning himself explicitly as heir and interpreter of the architect, in his truth-seeking architectural research – which once again places on the table the great problem of art as a producer of truth – and with built works[36] in which he develops the sense of rotation that in the Casa del fascio and the Casa Giuliani-Frigerio emerge with evidence, yet never too overtly.

The interior is also most remarkable, developing still further the theme of transparency and of glass, one of the ciphers of the architect’s poetics, from which, not by chance, we set out. A careful reading of the interior surfaces, almost entirely glazed or covered in glass, has been carried out, with a splendid philological analysis too, by Attilio Terragni, who republishes the photographs, probably taken by Ico Parisi, together with the architect himself, for the monographic issue of «Quadrante» that was to document the Casa del fascio. What emerges is a play of refractions and reflections, highly calculated and spectacular, open to many readings. If at first one cannot but be reminded of an allusion, if not to the Baroque then certainly to Mannerism, on the other hand the decomposition and the reflections of the image, with its multiplication, might lead one to reconnect this moment of his work also to premises seen in the installation of the Sala O – and thus to ponder his relations with Futurism, not by the architectural, Sant’Elian route but rather with Futurist art and painting of the first and second generations, and perhaps also with certain movements of contemporary German photomontage. Nor should one pass over a quasi-cinematic suggestion, of the moving image, well brought out by Attilio Terragni in the cited text of the Atlante: to the illusory doubling of the proportions is added a visual simultaneity that alludes to “a different way for architecture to endure”.

THE ASILO SANT’ELIA IN COMO

Thanks to a widespread, early and substantially favourable reception, the Asilo, of 1936-37, was very well received at the time. The luminosity of the spaces, the ample glazed surfaces, which light up the children’s daily lives, coexist here with a complex spatial articulation, of substantially horizontal development. “The block is broken up in an outside-inside integration, which is the generator, at once functional and poetic, of the composition” writes Argan. In his report the architect describes his work thus: “The building is single-storey, not much raised above the ground so as to reduce the access steps to a minimum”(…)“The entrance hall, broad and luminous, is part of a larger covered space, the recreation room. (…) The concept set out earlier, that the Asilo be considered as a house for one large Family, has advised against long, monotonous corridors, arranging the main rooms, classrooms, refectories and offices around this hall-and-recreation-room at the centre of the building.”.

In a Tavola polemica devoted to Scuole e bimbi he would add: “Economy, that eternal enemy of sound initiatives, is too often taken as a pretext for mean and inadequate architecture. And so it happens, perhaps, that the prejudice of the ‘façade in style’ eats up the money needed for a simple and luminous construction. Four walls are enough to create a school building. True economy consists in opening in these four walls as many grand windows through which light and air may burst in, the only medicines that children need.”[37]. In this case Terragni’s poetics of glass seems to reach a peak, while the building’s intended use qualifies its clear ethical and social choice.

THE CASA GIULIANI-FRIGERIO IN COMO

Eisenman, exegete of Terragni, writes: “The Casa del fascio and the Casa Giuliani-Frigerio may be regarded as examples of critical texts of architecture, in that the meanings of their façades, plans and sections can be read as displacements with respect to an architecture made of hierarchy, unity, sequence, progression and continuity, towards an architecture made of fragmentation, disjunction, contingency, alteration and oscillation. In this sense the Casa del fascio and the Casa Giuliani-Frigerio can no longer be classified as Rationalist or Modernist” (…) “if traditional architecture is usually describable as a sequence and as the sum of the perceptions willed by the architect, the Casa Giuliani-Frigerio advances the possibility that there may be a different kind of perception, made of increments, contingent on the physical aspect, transversal with respect to the building and its surroundings: significantly, this transversality occurs with respect to a path, which is not the only one, nor even hierarchical.”[38].

I would add that this is all the more evident thanks to a pictorial use of colour and of materials, that is, of small tesserae in an extremely sober grey, which creates effects of luminous interaction and refraction, capable of making the building vibrant and atmospheric, almost natural and living, while the spatial articulations follow an intrinsic, afunctional rhythm that profoundly inspired the architecture of Deconstructivism.

The reading by incoherent fragments suggested by Eisenman also calls into play a disjunct and active relation with the observer which, continuing what we have already said supra concerning the Casa del fascio and its relation with the visitor or the passer-by, seems to me to prefigure, on one hand, outcomes of co-operation of the beholder with the work of art, which will, once again, be fully explored only by the art of the 1960s and after, and, on the other, a status of work of the art, to paraphrase Genette[39], itself likewise still to come at the time the building was made, in 1939-40.

Further elements of counter-proof of the profound contemporaneity of Terragni’s architecture.

THE DANTEUM

Many scholars have fixed their attention, in recent years, on a project that remained unbuilt: the Danteum, of 1938. To it a fine exhibition was also devoted, some time ago, at the CIAC in Foligno[40].

Visionary and introspective elements of Terragni’s architecture seem here to explode, aided by the theme, which favoured a fantastical treatment and which also suggested a taut reflection on architecture and its social role as an itinerarium mentis towards grace.

Both Eisenman and Daniel Libeskind, another heir of Terragni’s architectural language, have devoted important words to the Danteum: “But surely the most incredible story is that of the Danteum. This work, for Terragni, is not simply about Rome or about Dante; it is a story about hell, about purgatory and about a possible paradise. And it is all these things together, hell, purgatory and paradise, that must be taken into account as part of Terragni’s greatness, because he was not merely someone who chose one of these three moments, but an artist involved in the entire spectrum of human existence.”[41], writes Libeskind.

The perceptual dynamics, the symbolic reading, the almost theatrical unfolding of the poetics of materials from the marble slate of hell to the glass forest of paradise – an allusion to the paradisiacal light but also almost to the Edenic garden, in a more human dimension, and to the labyrinths of a glorious and liberated consciousness – qualify the work, while great seriousness and commitment emerge in the taut considerations the architect writes in his report. A commitment commensurate with the figure to be celebrated, the supreme poet.

A “perfect memory machine”, as Attilio Terragni has defined it[42], profoundly attentive to the proportions of the Commedia, and in which, on one hand, the most meditated harmonic laws become a stimulus and a viaticum for history as civic consciousness – many memorial themes in Terragni’s heirs too, it will be observed – while, on the other, distant suggestions of utopian architecture are reshaped into a faith that makes one trasumanar.

The novelties, above all symbolic and perceptual, of the project, which was to have inserted itself with great authority into the area of the Imperial Fora, shift his architecture towards a new perspective, leaving in suspense the regret for the developments that never came, and confirming the multiplicity of readings made possible through contemporaneity.

An architecture, then, that today, paradoxically, appears to us close to the contemporary, thanks also to the fertile critical and architectural passage of its exegetes.

A contemporary architecture, and heavy with future.

[1] For a reasoned reconstruction see Giorgio Ciucci Terragni e l’architettura in Giuseppe Terragni, exhibition catalogue edited by Giorgio Ciucci and Marco De Michelis, Triennale di Milano, Milan, 11 May – 3 November 1996, Electa, Milan 1996, with complete earlier bibliography edited by Annalisa Avon.

[2] G. Terragni Progresso dell’arialuce, Tavola polemica, in «Quadrante» no. 35-36, Documentario sulla Casa del fascio di Como, 1936

[3] G. Terragni La rivoluzione del vetro, Tavola polemica, in «Quadrante» no. 35-36, Documentario sulla Casa del fascio di Como, 1936

[4] Attilio Terragni, Daniel Libeskind, Paolo Rosselli Atlante Terragni Architetture costruite, Skira, Milan 2004.

[5] The use of glass has become an almost meta-historical category of the modern language in architecture: the examples are innumerable; among the most recent one might cite the new BNL headquarters in Rome by Gianluca Peluffo, of 2016.

[6] This is the Monument to the Gold Medal recipient Roberto Sarfatti, of 1934-1935, on which cf. Thomas L. Schumacher Tra, intorno e dentro i monumenti e le tombe di Terragni in Giuseppe Terragni, exhibition catalogue edited by Giorgio Ciucci and Marco De Michelis, cit. On the support relating to the polemics that flared up over the Casa del Fascio cf. Marina Sommella Grossi Sartoris e Terragni: la polemica sulla Casa del fascio di Como in Giuseppe Terragni, cit.

[7] The Monument, with Attilio Terragni, dates from 1930 / 1931-33. Developed from a sketch by Sant’Elia and worked up by Prampolini, the direction and execution of the works was entrusted to the Studio Terragni, and the design of the crypt to Giuseppe. See, among others, the reconstruction by Alberto Longatti in La linea tra due frontiere in Giuseppe Terragni, cit.

[8] Giuseppe Terragni I marmi in «Quadrante» no. 35-36, 1936, reprinted in A. Terragni D. Libeskind, P. Rosselli Atlante Terragni, cit.

[9] Venturi, with his concept of taste, put forward a historical reconstruction of past epochs that was not top-down but historically complex and motivated; cf. Lionello Venturi Il gusto dei primitivi, Zanichelli, Bologna 1926; Bianchi Bandinelli, for his part, was beginning to propose (deepening it thereafter from the following decade on) an anti-rhetorical version of antiquity, investigating with acumen areas hitherto neglected, and far removed chronologically, geographically and in intent from the mannered classicity of the Fascist intellectuals.

[10] It is worth noting that the idea of antiquity the regime had championed has never been fully called into question, an element that would incline one towards an incomplete liquidation of this specific aspect of that cultural legacy.

[11] On the history of Gerardo Dottori’s fresco cf. my Perugia liberata Arte e sistema dell’arte a Perugia da fine anni Trenta ai primi anni Cinquanta, with a preface by Enrico Crispolti, Rubbettino, Soveria Mannelli 2012.

[12] “The Rationalist language, especially in the Le Corbusian version dominant in the 1930s, nurtures within itself the lethal germs of classicism (…) it exhumes elementary geometry, the square and the cube, closed and static figures, as well as the golden section of the Renaissance”; cf. Bruno Zevi Terragni, cospiratore manierista in Giuseppe Terragni edited by Bruno Zevi, Serie di Architettura 7, Zanichelli, Bologna 1980.

[13] Marina Sommella Grossi Sartoris e Terragni: la polemica sulla Casa del fascio di Como in Giuseppe Terragni, cit

[14] Perhaps with some ambiguity.

[15] P. M. Bardi Le fonti della fantasia, in «Meridiano di Roma», 20 December 1936.

[16] Thus Terragni wrote to Sartoris; cf. Marina Sommella Grossi Sartoris e Terragni: la polemica sulla Casa del fascio di Como in Giuseppe Terragni, cit.

[17] In any case often too little Italian, according to Ojetti.

[18] On that occasion the Bramantesque language was invoked; cf. B. Pedace L’Italia delle arti all’Esposizione Universale di Parigi del 1867 in «Perusia. Rivista del Dipartimento di Culture Comparate dell’Università per Stranieri di Perugia», Nuova Serie N.8, 2012, Guerra Edizioni, Perugia 2012.

[19] Giuseppe Terragni edited by Bruno Zevi, cit.

[20] Advocating the freedom to betray prototypes and models, for the purposes of quotation; cf. Achille Bonito Oliva L’ideologia del traditore. Arte, maniera e manierismo, Feltrinelli, Milan 1976.

[21] Metropole Suisse, Letter from Giuseppe Terragni to the Commissione d’ornato of the City of Como, published in Attilio Terragni Daniel Libeskind Paolo Rosselli Atlante Terragni Architetture costruite, Skira, Milan 2004.

[22] Manfredo Tafuri Giuseppe Terragni: subject and “mask” in «Oppositions», 11, Winter 1977; then, Il soggetto e la maschera. Una introduzione a Terragni in «Lotus», 20, September 1978.

[23] See also what Attilio Terragni writes in A. Terragni, D. Libeskind, P. Rosselli Atlante Terragni, cit. (“The further one ventures into the works presented in the Atlante, the easier it becomes to grasp the distance of Terragni’s works from those of Le Corbusier, Mies and Gropius, the masters of the first generation of the Modern Movement”).

[24] The relations between the two were relatively closer, and Le Corbusier delivered an important address on the occasion of the Prima mostra commemorativa di Giuseppe Terragni, held in Como in 1949.

[25] M. Tafuri Il soggetto e la maschera. Una introduzione a Terragni in «Lotus», 20, September 1978.

[26] Massimo Cacciari La mente inquieta. Saggio sull’Umanesimo, Einaudi, Turin 2019.

[27] G. Ciucci Terragni e l’architettura in Giuseppe Terragni, exhibition catalogue edited by Giorgio Ciucci and Marco De Michelis, cit.; the text cited is G. Pagano I benefici dell’architettura moderna (in proposito di una nuova costruzione a Como) in «La Casa bella», III, March 1930, 27.

[28] Cf. Edoardo Persico Brinkman e Van der Vlugt in «Casabella», 87, March 1935.

[29] Giuseppe Terragni edited by Bruno Zevi, cit.

[30] G. Carlo Argan Relazione al convegno L’eredità di Terragni e l’architettura italiana 1943-1968, Como, 14 September 1968 in L’architettura. Cronache e storia, 163, May 1969.

[31] On the role played by Argan in those years I take the liberty of referring to my Interrelazioni tra l’arte italiana e gli Stati Uniti (1963-1971). Problemi estetici e critici, Rubbettino, Soveria Mannelli 2018.

[32] They were decisive years both for the changes in status and in canons that occurred and for the interrelations between Italy and the United States; cf. B. Pedace Interrelazioni tra l’arte italiana e gli Stati Uniti (1963-1971). Problemi estetici e critici, cit.

[33] Ibidem.

[34] G. Ciucci Terragni e l’architettura in Giuseppe Terragni, exhibition catalogue edited by Giorgio Ciucci and Marco De Michelis, cit.

[35] Among them: Peter Eisenman The use of ambiguity as a transformational method in «Perspecta», 13-14, 1971; Id. Giuseppe Terragni e l’idea di testo critico, in Giuseppe Terragni, exhibition catalogue edited by G. Ciucci and M. De Michelis, cit.

[36] Among them: IBA Social Housing, 1981-1985, Berlin (West); Koizumi Sangyo Corporation, 1988-1990, Tokyo; Haus Immendorf, 1993; Aronoff Center for Design and Art, 1996, Cincinnati, Ohio; Il giardino dei passi perduti, 2005, Verona, 2005; Yenikapi Archaeological Museum and Archeo-Park, Istanbul, 2012- ongoing.

[37] Terragni’s report, published in A. Terragni, D. Libeskind, P. Rosselli Atlante Terragni, cit.

[38] P. Eisenman Giuseppe Terragni e l’idea di testo critico, in Giuseppe Terragni, exhibition catalogue edited by G. Ciucci and M. De Michelis, cit.

[39] G. Genette L’opera dell’arte. La relazione estetica, CLUEB, Bologna 1998.

[40] Giuseppe Terragni. Danteum: un viaggio nell’architettura, exhibition curated by Attilio Terragni and Italo Tomassoni, CIAC, Foligno, 6 October – 9 December 2012. ali&no editore, 2012. On that occasion the Engineering-Architecture students of the University of Perugia took part in a workshop, designing an analogous theme for Piazza Italia in Perugia; cf. Paolo Belardi Danteum. Oggi, ibidem.

[41] D. Libeskind Life after life in A. Terragni, D. Libeskind, P. Rosselli Atlante Terragni, cit

[42] A. Terragni Premessa in Giuseppe Terragni. Danteum: un viaggio nell’architettura, exhibition curated by Attilio Terragni and Italo Tomassoni, cit.

Trained at the University of Perugia and a research doctor in Art History at the University of Siena under E. Crispolti, Bianca Pedace obtained a doctorate at the University for Foreigners of Perugia. She teaches Aesthetics at the Academy of Fine Arts of Perugia and at that of Reggio Calabria. An independent curator, she is the author of monographs including: Vittoria Lippi, Rubbettino, 2011; Perugia liberata. Artisti e sistema dell’arte a Perugia da fine anni Trenta ai primi anni Cinquanta, Rubbettino, 2012; Interrelazioni tra l’arte italiana e gli Stati Uniti (1963-1971). Problemi estetici e critici, Rubbettino, 2018. She practises and professes the interrelation between the historical, critical and theoretical dimensions.