PurplePrice Mag · · 3 min read
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Rationalism is the Italian version of the Modern Movement, which developed from the mid-1920s to the late 1930s. Like Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus, the Rationalists rejected eclecticism and decoration, and based architecture on function, geometry and new materials such as reinforced concrete, glass and steel. Unlike many of their European colleagues, however, they sought a link with the Italian classical tradition of proportion, order and measure.
Gruppo 7 and MIAR
It all began in Milan in October 1926, when seven young architects from the Politecnico founded Gruppo 7: Giuseppe Terragni, Luigi Figini, Gino Pollini, Guido Frette, Sebastiano Larco, Carlo Enrico Rava and Ubaldo Castagnoli, who was replaced the following year by Adalberto Libera. Between December 1926 and May 1927 they published four articles in the Rassegna Italiana. They wrote that architecture "can no longer be individual" and that eclecticism must be countered by "the spirit of mass construction", but they also made clear: "we do not want to break with tradition".
In 1928 MIAR, the Italian Movement for Rational Architecture, was founded; it organised two exhibitions in Rome, in 1928 and 1931. At the second, the critic Pietro Maria Bardi displayed his provocative "Table of Horrors", a photomontage that ridiculed the academic, monumental buildings of the architects closest to the regime, such as Marcello Piacentini. The controversy was huge, and MIAR was dissolved shortly afterwards.
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The works
The masterpiece of Rationalism is Terragni's Casa del Fascio in Como, inaugurated in 1936. It is a perfect half-cube, 33.20 metres on each side and 16.60 metres high, with a façade clad in Botticino marble and built on geometric proportions, and a large central hall covered by a glass-block skylight. Also in Como, in 1928–1929, Terragni had built the Novocomum, an apartment building that caused a scandal: to obtain the permit he had submitted drawings with neoclassical façades, and only when the scaffolding came down did the city discover its pure volumes and stairwells in glass cylinders. In Florence the Gruppo Toscano, led by Giovanni Michelucci, won the 1932 competition for the new Santa Maria Novella station.
Rationalism also entered the factory and the home. From the mid-1930s Figini and Pollini designed the Olivetti buildings in Ivrea. For the interiors of the Casa del Fascio, Terragni designed the Lariana chair (1936), in tubular steel with a wooden seat and back, reissued by Zanotta from 1971. The magazines Casabella, edited by Giuseppe Pagano with Edoardo Persico, and Domus spread the new ideas, and a new generation of designers, from Franco Albini to BBPR, grew up in this climate.
The relationship with Fascism
Rationalism was born and grew under Fascism, and many of its protagonists hoped to make it the regime's official architecture. The regime, however, increasingly chose Piacentini's classicising monumentality, as the project for E42, today's EUR district in Rome, shows. Some Rationalists turned away from Fascism and paid a very high price. Pagano joined the Resistance and died in the Mauthausen concentration camp in 1945. In the same year Gian Luigi Banfi, the B of BBPR, died at Gusen. After the war Rationalist ideas inspired reconstruction and Italian design in the 1950s.
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