Giuseppe Terragni
Giuseppe Terragni ( born April 18, 1904 in Meda, Italy, † July 19, 1943 in Como, Italy ) was an Italian architect and one of the most important representatives of Italian rationalism.
Biography
Giuseppe Terragni Ercole Enea was born as the youngest of four sons of the company acting in Meda contractor Michele Terragni. 1909 the family moved to Como Terragni into via Independenza. From 1917 visited Giuseppe Terragni the Istituto Tecnico Caio Plinio Secondo in Como. Then he studied from 1921 to 1926 architecture at Milan Polytechnic, where he graduated in October 1926.
Together with six other graduates of the Politecnico di Milano - Luigi Figini, Guido Frette, Sebastiano Larco, Adalberto Libera, Gino Pollini, Carlo Enrico Rava - he founded in 1926/27 under the name of Gruppo 7, the architectural movement of Architettura Razionale. The manifesto of Italian Rationalism ( rationalist ), the so-called 4 note, published by the Gruppo 7 under the title "Architecture and a new era of classical music " in the journal La Rassegna Italiana between December 1926 and May 1927.
After his degree in architecture Giuseppe 1927, with his brother Attilio Terragni an architectural firm in his parents' house in Como. This office was led until 1939. In the first exhibition of Architettura Razionale 1928 in Rome Terragni was present with his design for a gas plant in Como ( 1927). 1932 started his collaboration with the Milanese architect Piero Lingeri, with whom he made the Casa Rustici in Milan in 1936.
Terragni is one of the most important pioneers of modern architecture in Italy. For Bruno Zevi is the work of Terragni is the anchor point of an organic and internally democratic architecture for which it is otherwise in Italy barely starting points. One of the key design elements of its architecture included the strict rejection of historicism and the reduction to elementary geometric forms. In addition to the focus on the guiding principles of classical modernism were the romanità and mediterraneità aware of national building traditions as a model. Especially the use of marble, or even the three-dimensionality of the facade count for Architettura Razionale to national imprints. In 1925 Terragni had traveled to Florence and Rome to study the architecture of antiquity and the Renaissance there. He was fascinated by the crystal-clear geometric shapes, the shape of wealth based on a few types. For a precise study of modern architecture he undertook in 1927 ( October / November) and 1931 (November) trips to Germany.
According to his self-image looked Terragni 's architecture by no means free from historical, especially classical references. In line with its abstracting moments he was referring to conscious in ancient Roman times, as show as the quality of order and rhythm in his work. Terragni classicism is thus based on an absolute purism mathematical relationships, expressed in classic proportions.
In his only 13 -year-long creative period from 1926 to 1939 he erected many buildings that are consistently supported by the spirit of modernity, including the residential building Novocomum with its distinctive, reminiscent of Konstantin Stepanovich Melnikov corner solution (1929 ), the Casa del Fascio (now Casa del Popolo, 1936), with its rationalist proportion and spatial planning system as well as the kindergarten Sant'Elia (1937 ). All of these buildings are in Hauptschaffensort Terragni, Como in northern Italy.
It was typical for the situation in Italy that Terragni, like almost all other leading Italian modernists, openly known to fascism and its rationalist architecture tried to serve the regime as a state style. It was only after 1935, won in Italy neoclassical monumental tendencies of the so-called Scuola Romana gradually the upper hand. Terragni had not, however, leave it up to his early death at age 39 influence. On July 19, 1943, he died in Como at the consequences of its use as a soldier in the German - Italian front in Russia. After a short time in the Russian field hospital he was returned to Italy in January 1943 and sent to Cesenatico in the Ospedale Militare. Despite prolonged hospital stays, however, he could not recover and suffered a cerebral venous thrombosis.
Especially for subsequent architects like Aldo Rossi, Peter Eisenman Nicos Valsamakis but also Giuseppe Terragni was an important reference point.