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Modernity in the Balance: Italy’s Equilibrium 23
The latter pair had proposed cities as linear strands of housing, commercial,
and industrial programs, each separated by additional bands of transportation
infrastructure, and all graphically represented as aerial views in bird’s eye
perspective. 15 Futurism provided a fundamental conduit to other coincident
avant-garde movements, especially Russian Constructivism, whose short-lived
period nevertheless influenced Italian designers, and in particular some early
projects by Albini. However, as the political winds began to shift, no formal
trends, regardless of their provocation, could gain purchase in Italy in the 1920s
without the ability to signify locally.
Novecento Architecture and Rationalism
Tangible architectural innovation began to emerge in Italy only after the
political upheaval and severe economic austerity that accompanied World War I.
While Albini was growing up in the Brianza region outside of Milan in a middleclass
family, two succeeding Modern tendencies known as the Novecento, or
Milan 900, and Rationalism began being defined in sharp contrast with previous
avant-garde trends. 16 They presented positions dialectical from each other, albeit
false oppositions, which established a dynamic exchange that filled journals
and aligned the various protagonists who would vie for prominence to be the
regime’s preferred style. Each born of a position taken against Futurism, they
sought formal distinction from one another, and those disparities indeed grew,
especially as the first Rationalist buildings appeared. Initially, however, both
groups seemed rhetorically aligned; both demanded departure from the status
quo of Neoclassicism while rebuking imported Modern styles. The lead voices
of each group identified their movement as the ideal of progress and called
for a “return to order,” while distancing themselves from avant-garde agitation
and promising new stability after World War I. Significantly, each linked its
primary sources of ideas to Italian tradition and reacted against what had
come to be considered as Futurism’s nihilist, destructive, and anti-national
individualist posture. 17
Two buildings built in the north in the 1920s can be invoked to exemplify
the coincident trends. Giovanni Muzio’s Cà Brutta, or ugly house, in Milan and
Giuseppe Terragni’s Novocomum in Como illustrate, respectively, the more
conservative and more abstract styles of early Italian Modern architecture.
Both are apartment buildings that were known to have ignited controversy
when their construction scaffolding was removed to reveal unexpected façades
that eventually challenged public opinion toward both formal languages.
The relatively rapid acceptance of these two symbols of change suggests a
society ready to modernize, yet both Novecento and Rationalist designers would
suffer growing pains and manifest more defensive rhetoric in favor of their own
experimental buildings in the early post-war period.