Giuseppe Terragni, Casa Rustici, Milan, Italy, 1933

Date:March 20, 2014

← Carlo Mollino, Mostra Musa, New York, USA, 1950

Adolf Loos, Würfelhaus, Not realized, 1929 →

Giuseppe Terragni, Casa Rustici, Milan, Italy, 1933

Giuseppe Terragni was an italian architect, he was a pioneer of italian rationalism. In 1926 he was a co-funder of ‘gruppo 7’. He deigned not only buildings, but also series of furniture for those interiors.

Giuseppe Terragni constructed this apartment building over a trapezoidal plot bounded by three streets; one of them Corso Sempione, Of the five collective housing buildings designed by the architect in Milan, only Rustici House manages to overcome his usual linguistic to grapple with the problem of the corner and the facade in the modern city. Terragni proposed adding two parallel bodies perpendicular to the main street to the usual scheme of a tall body and two lower ones on either side of it. Through a system of walkway-balconies he creates a symmetrical yet tense and fragile facade like a torn diaphragm whose interior virtually encloses the large inner courtyard between both bodies. The treatment of the other two facades – the ones facing the side streets – stresses the expression of the structural framework which at the penthouse level is contained by flat, continuous eaves running along the entire facade. On the north, Terragni added a secondary body, set back and distinguished by the opening of the courtyards along its entire vertical plane.

Terragni uses white marble to graphically reinforce the display of pillars and columns, as well as other elements like the lateral body on the northern side, while the rest of the surface is clad in ochre-colored plaster. The entrance landing is covered with a canopy made of concrete and glass bricks, similar to the solutions used in Casa de Fascio in Como, Italy. Despite the insistent expression of the structural syntax on the facade and the dynamism introduced by the more floating, lighter elements that intervene in the composition of this building, the structure on the floors seems confused with the partition walls within relatively conventional layouts.

Layouts: