gave Lake Como Design Festival Among the jagged hills of northern Italy is a cultural adventure held every fall. For the latest edition, the theme was lightness, and the stars of the show were delicate glassware, clean textiles, swaying mobiles and spider chairs. The program also included visits to some of the most treasured 20th-century architecture, buildings so monumental and unadorned that they almost seemed to float.
Yet there was no light on their origin. Much of Como’s rationalist architecture, as the Italian modernist style is known, was by young, experimental practitioners in the service of Mussolini. Chief among this group was Giuseppe Terragni (1904–1943), celebrated for his widely recognized masterpiece: the Casa del Faccio, or House of Fascism, National Party offices in Como.
These days Mussolini is back in the spotlight. “M: Son of the CenturyThe eight-part television series, directed by Joe Wright, was screened at the Venice Film Festival in September and will be broadcast on Sky Italy from Friday. Like popular 2018 The novel On which it is based, the series graphically describes the fascist leader’s brutality as well as the charisma that brought him to power.
In an email, Referring to the rise of authoritarian regimes, Wright described “M” as “a very political series about what’s happening today, not just in America, but around the world.” He added: “Making ‘M’ seems to me, personally, to be a way of addressing the roots of this movement and learning where it came from so that it can now be faced with greater awareness.”
And what about the monuments that form the backdrop to Mussolini’s regime and continue to inspire? (Today, Italian travel companies regularly offer campaigns such as “Mussolini Imperial Architecture Tour,(Taking rationalist developments like the EUR neighborhood in Rome that was conceived as a celebration of fascism in the 1930s.)
There is no room for reconsideration of the government’s tyranny, but the Casa del Fascio and other buildings in Terragni and its environs show how difficult it can be to judge the intentions and messages of the architects who served it. is
Designed in 1932 and completed in 1936, the Casa del Fascio lived up to Mussolini’s description of Terragni’s summary as “a glass house into which everyone can peer.” Terragni located the building across from Como Cathedral and gave it a detached skeletal frame. The wide, transparent entrance allowed those gathered in the front plaza to feel that they could mingle with the powers within.
Yet according to his admirers, Terragni did more than take Mussolini at his (highly dubious) word for transparency. He designed Casa del Facio to respond to the fluctuating, indeterminate movements of nature rather than to the controlling gestures of totalitarianism. He wanted nothing to do with growing columns, tight symmetry or neutralizing white squares.
In the large, central atrium of the Casa del Fascio, Mike Dolinsky, an American architect based in Como, points out how light bounces off the polished marble, ceramic tile and glass, which is originally painted yellows, greens, blues. And transforms the black color palette into a bright one. Color interaction.
The four sides of the building were given different window sizes and arrangements, which regulated the thermal effect of the sun in each direction. The jazzy appearance of the south facade is inspired by Piet Mondrian’s “Broadway Boogie-WoogiePainted less than a decade later.
Terragni’s architecture “always destroys the idea of a single order, destroys the idea of authority,” said architect Daniel Libeskind, who worked as a student of one of Terragni’s great champions, American architects. Analytical drawing of the building was done. Peter Eisenman.
“It’s a home for everyone, it’s open, it’s my place, it’s your place. It’s a symbol for every class and political thought,” said Attilio Terragni, whose grandfather, an engineer, There was also Attilio, brother of Giuseppe Terragni. (The younger Attilio, an architect, was part of the team that worked with Libeskind on its design. Jewish Museum BerlinAn anti-fascist monument if there ever was one.)
Like Libeskind, Attilio Terragni argued for the inherent progressivism of the Casa del Fascio. This attitude, he said, was honed by his uncle Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s concept of the social contract, or the need for society to agree to the rules by which it is governed.
But Ruth Ben-Ghias, a historian of fascism at New York University and author of the bookstrong man: Mussolini until now“, was less willing to go through with the building’s height, especially now that Italy has the most right-wing government since World War II.
“The concept of fascism as a glass house implies principles of transparency that are the exact opposite,” he said. “Fascism was to hide the truth because anyone who tried to tell the truth would be killed or imprisoned.”
Casa del Faccio was an important part of the regime, he continued. “These were local fascist clubs, headquarters where you would see propaganda films and news releases, where local policy would be discussed. You would have to try very hard to extract the history of rationalism from any context of fascism.
Complicating today’s attitudes toward the building is the story of Terragni himself.
He was still a teenager in 1922, when Mussolini marched on Rome with an armed army of revolutionaries and seized power. While studying architecture in Milan, Terragni and a group of fellow students developed the principles of rationalism, a version of modernism that did not completely reject classical forms or materials but instead made subtle references to them. Make things.
In 1927, Terragni joined the National Fascist Party and served in the military in Italy. The following year, construction began on the first major Rationalist structure in Italy, an apartment building near the Como waterfront called Novocome, with the rounded shapes of an ocean liner (it was nicknamed Il Transatlantico). To ensure that the city would approve the design, he submitted drawings of a facade with neoclassical ornament—pilasters, pediments, arched windows. It was purely a bluff. When the scaffolding came down in 1929, and the fraud was revealed, Como’s Commission of Fine Arts demanded that the jewels be included. Terragni kept his place, and the building remained unadorned if undoubtedly lush.
Terragni teamed up with other architects with roots in Como, notably Pietro Langeri, with whom he designed several apartment houses in Milan and an unfinished building that paid homage to Dante’s “Divine Comedy”. Offered devotion. Completed in 1944, Langeri’s layered and elegantly skeletonized Villa Leoni, in Osoccio, overlooking Lake Como, is a rationalist beauty that owes a clear debt to the Casa del Faccio.
In the early days of his dictatorship, Mussolini encouraged artistic innovation as a counterpoint to Italy’s reputation for cultural backwardness. His lover, the journalist and art critic Margherita Sarfati, saw in Rationalism a balance between the heavy hand of Golden Age nostalgists and the dizzying visions of futurists. (Modern architecture has no role in the “M” series, which plays largely in the royal rooms with swinging lampshades and magnificent crystal chandeliers. But you can see its influence all around. Mussolini’s Prime Minister After assuming the post, Sarfati is shown walking around his magnificent home in Rome, declaring, “Let’s get rid of these dark and dusty colors. Everything needs to reflect change. “
Sarfati eventually commissioned Terragni to design a memorial for his son Robert, who had died in the First World War. Giuseppe and his brother Attilio had already completed the municipal memorial to the fallen soldiers of the Great War. Sketched in 1932, the Monumento a Cadotti in Como was based on a sketch of a power plant by the futurist architect Antonio Sant’Elia. Terragni built a minimal monument to Robert Sarfati in 1935 from stone slabs on a plateau in Asiago.
His commission for the Casio del Fascio came in 1932 through Attilio, later the Fascist mayor of Como. Devoted to contemporary art, Giuseppe commissioned an abstract mural from his friend, avant-garde artist Mario Radice, for the main conference room wall and designed modern, tubular steel chairs around the conference table. These chairs, called Lariana, were arranged everywhere except at the head of the table, where a giant portrait of Mussolini attached to the wall behind him gave the impression that Al Doss was forever presiding.
“Presiding over this three-dimensional space as a two-dimensional image,” Libeskind said with a laugh.
Terragni’s career did not last long, and Mussolini turned to bombastic monumentalism as his preferred building style. In 1943, four years after Mussolini and Hitler formally signed the Pact of Steel, Terragni was called back into military service and sent to the Eastern Front as an artillery commander. He returned to Como broken.
“He died of post-shock electroshock,” a dangerous therapy at the time, his nephew said, adding that rumors that Terragni had committed suicide over his fascist loyalties were part of a campaign by fans. He was 39 years old. Mussolini would fall from power six days later.
Casa del Faccio was targeted for demolition in the 1950s. Yet Bruno Zevi, a Jewish architect and critic, headed a long line of prominent left-wing figures who vociferously defended the building and its creator.
Since 1957, Casa del Faccio has been the headquarters of the Italian financial police, the Guardia di Finanza. The building remains open to the public through special arrangements. The once colorful interior paint is now white, and the black marble ceiling at the entrance has been destroyed. But visitors can still climb the glass-sided front steps and feel suspended in a glowing cube.
An organization is called MAARCThe Virtual Museum of Abstract and Rationalist Art in Como has campaigned to convert the building into a museum and study center for 20th-century art and architecture. But Attilio Terragni said it’s better as it is. Guardia di Finanza is not under the municipality’s jurisdiction and does not have to comply with building codes, which he believes would do more harm than good to clarify his uncle’s vision.
The question is how to frame this vision.
Ben-Ghiat, an NYU historian, has proposed a simple plaque describing the legacy of Casa del Faccio. “I think it’s important that it keep its original name as a historical document, a place of memory,” he said.