Terragni and Classicism: Fence Sitting at the Barricades

Abstract

Schumacher is a registered architect and has worked in the offices of Manfredi Nicoletti in Rome, Brown/Daltas in Rome, and I.M. Pei and Partners in New York. He was a Research Associate at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York.Schumacher has taught at several universities, including Princeton, the University of Virginia, and the Catholic University of America, and is currently Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Maryland. He has been a visiting professor at Carnegie-Mellon University, the Istituto Universitario dell'Architettura di Venezia, the University of Illinois at Chicago and Temple University. He has lectured at Universities in the U.S., Canada, Italy and West Germany.Thomas Schumacher's articles have appeared in various magazines and journals including Architectural Design, the Harvard Architecture Review, The Architectural Review, Casabella, and Oppositions. He is the author of The Danteum, A Study in the Architecture of Literature (7 985), published by the Princeton Architectural Press. He is presently working on a book and a video tape on facade composition, entitled The Palladio Variations, and on a monograph on the Italian Rationalist architect, Giuseppe Terragni.Virtually all the architects of the Modern Movement began their careers with one or another version of the Classical vocabulary. But unlike other Modernists, Terragni continued to use specifically classical forms and details during much of his career, rather than abandoning them to the more abstract modern idiom.Terragni's involvement with Classicism comes from a variety of sources: the heightened nationalism of both the Risorgimento and Fascism, the concept of Mediterraneanism—common to much of the Modern Movement—and the myth of the ‘Masters of Como.’ This Classicism manifests itself in a number of ways: in proportion, figure, parti-forms, compositional regularity, cubic stereometry; but most importantly in the use of classical detail-forms. But his sense of the “well-built” building, in the tradition of the great Lombard builders of the Romanesque period and later, is present in all his buildings and projects, in the International-Style works as well as in those designed in a Classical language.Terragni's buildings in “literal” Classical style each represent a variation on the work of a different major architect of the Italian Classical tradition. But it was in his less archeologically classical buildings that Terragni succeeded in combining all these influences and adaptations to produce a truly independent and original expression of his own. They are the Casa del Fascio in Como, the Danteum project and the Pal. Littorio Competition, solution “A.” In these buildings the underlying substratum of Classicism that was Le Corbusier's, Mies's and Wright's shows Terragni to be yet another crypto-Classicist in Modern-Movement dress.