John Pardey on Giuseppe Terragni’s Casa del Fascio (1936) in Como, Italy – a building that manages to embrace classical proportions and Modernist abstraction while mediating between solid and void as a means of expression.
(Credit: Danny Alexander Lettkemann via Wikipedia Commons)
This article is part of a monthly series of short essays on some of the greatest buildings of the 20th Century. Read John Pardey’s introduction to the series here.
On more than one occasion it has been of great comfort to me to fix my admiring eyes on the authentic exemplars of the architecture of the past, studying with joy the marvellous lesson of life (evolution + revolution) that those who have proved capable of overcoming, in observation, the formal stylistic characteristics, are able to discover through mathematical law proportions in their exact beauty.”
— Giuseppe Terragni
Giuseppe Terragni’s early death at the age of 39 lingers with poignancy: he was a member of the Italian National Fascist Party, and he died on the steps of his girlfriend’s house in Como. This was attributed to various probable causes, including a possible psychological breakdown, a nervous collapse, tuberculosis, an embolism, and even suicide. He was also one of the great architects of the 20th century.
In 1939, with World War Two raging, he was sent as a captain in the artillery to the eastern battlefields of the Balkans and Russia – and after commanding barrages against what he was to describe as “nothing more than teenagers,” he suffered a breakdown. Following a spell in a military hospital, he was returned to Italy in January 1943 to convalesce.
Today, there is an obsession with the private lives of the famous who are long dead. We want to know not just if they were great artists, but if they were good people. Picasso may have been a chauvinist pig and a sexual predator, Larkin a racist misery, but perhaps their personal failings fuelled their creativity. And yet I feel Terragni, while aligned to the Fascist Party, was a great artist. His work oozes sensitivity, poetry and intelligence. His was a story of a life colliding with world events.
(Credit: Alberto Corbella via Wikipedia Commons)
His brother was also an architect and podesta (mayor) of Como and as such, was close to Benito Mussolini. In 1932 they were commissioned to design a new office for the National Fascist Party on the Piazza del Popolo in Como, inaugurated as the Casa del Fascio. They took no fee for this prestigious commission.
At that febrile time Mussolini had not prescribed a particular style for the national building programmes as Hitler had done, but Italy’s Albert Speer, Marcello Piacentini, was a proponent of ‘Monumentalism’ and had set about building Neo-classical victory arches. “We must still use heavy materials, in dimensions that cannot because of their nature, be differentiated from the old ones,” he pronounced.
Terragni, however, was on different tack and greatly admired the work of Corbusier and the De Stijl architects, in particular with regard to the latter for their use of a structural frame and high, abstract principles.
The Casa del Fascio takes cues from this and becomes a truly modern building that also mines the typology of the Renaissance Palazzo, notably in its use of the front to back partego (or atrium). Like Louis Kahn many years later, he looked back to Rome in order to move forward and his work is suffused with proportion and primary geometry.
(Credit: Comoinpoesia via Wikipedia Commons)
The building is a half of a cube in overall form, being 33.2 metres square in plan, and half that in hight at 16.6 metres. It is, like most modernist buildings, abstracted from the site by being set some four steps up.
Its plan is organised around a three-bay central atrium that runs from front to back like the Venetian palazzo to create a town hall, fully glazed, with 16 synchronised side-hung doors, creating as Terragni would write, “a glass house, into which everyone can peer.” On each side are office spaces with galleries (four bays, two each side) and above, deep planar beams traverse above the first floor with a glass block roof.
The main elevation onto the Piazza evokes both a stripped-back Palazzo in its proportions and a startlingly abstracted box. Here, it has been divided into seven bays wide and four bays high, with two infilled to form a solid wall. The rest become a frame, with the façade recessed backwards, creating, in turn, a powerful relationship between solid and void. The echo of De Stijl with its insistent grid set against a plane can be felt, while the elegant, thin construction, clad in marble, lends not just a sharp profile, but also a sense of the monumental a la Piacentini. At the top, the frame transitions back into the building where the atrium space is framed on all sides.
Each façade of the building has a different, if related, design. The frame is evident as the basic structure, sometimes infilled with solid panels, some with glass blocks, while some also experiment with different window arrangements that riff off the frame.
It must have been a perplexing building upon its opening in 1936 – being subliminally recognisable as a classical Palazzo in its scale, material and proportions, yet futuristic, with its frame releasing the walls to break all the rules.
The Party hierarchy, however, wanted a more demonstrative façade. One that was to lend an air of grandeur. And although Terragni was not happy about this desire, he commissioned a series of photomontages by Marcello Nizzoli that were to be mounted onto porcelain enamel panels and then onto the blank plane of the Casa del’s frontage. Such wishes never materialised though as this, nor the idea for propaganda film to be projected onto the façade, were ever realised.
(Credit: Renato Oldrini via Wikipedia Commons)
After his death on 19 July 1944, Terragni left us another project. ‘Danteum’ – designed in 1938 – might be one of the world’s greatest, and most abstract, buildings that utilised the Golden Section and Dante’s Divine Comedy to order an entire design. That building, along with Terragni’s Sant’Elia school in Como (1937), employ shifting planes and frames that figuratively speak to each other. Both are a must see for any student of architecture.
After the fall of Nazism in 1945, Terragni was air-brushed out of most mainstream histories of architecture, but it was to be the American architect and academic, Peter Eisenman in his 1970 PhD thesis, ‘From Object to Relationship’, published in Perspecta magazine that brought his work back into the light. Eisenman explored the abstraction evident in Terragni’s work mainly through analytical drawings that explored how building volumes evolved through additive or subtractive means. Eisenman also examined the shifting elements in Terragni’s work which were used to forge relationships in one part of the building while also linking to the next. The collective result was a rich architecture – all tied together through the use of proportion – which in doing so, revealed the sheer beauty and intellect behind his work.
In his short life, Terragni was to prove to be the bridge between Italy’s classical past and its Modernist future. He did so by understanding the geometries and proportions of the former to infuse depth and meaning, so that his buildings could converse beyond the object itself – from object to relationship – from a mere building to a work of art.
(Credit: Sergey Norin via Wikipedia Commons)
