Seen From Afar

DIARY OF A SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY THROUGH A FORGOT TEN ITALY

- Martin Feiersinger

While I was still a student in Vienna in the early 1980s, Gino Valle visited our studio and gave a talk. In addition to showing a number of prestigious, pragmatic buildings, he threw in a much smaller project, the Casa Rossa in Udine 1, and this building in particular puzzled me. It struck me as a better example of the architecture Robert Venturi was referring to in Complexity and Contradiction than the iconic house Venturi had designed for his mother. Valle’s design could be considered a subtle variation on the theme of the ordinary house. At about the same time, I came upon a very different building in a Japanese magazine, one that looked like a gigantic typewriter. It was Cappai & Mainardis’s La Serra 2, a training centre commissioned by Olivetti in the late 1960s for Ivrea’s centro storico. These two poles made me want to find out more about the diversity of Italy’s post-war architecture.

I had an intense desire to visit these buildings and see how they had stood the test of time. What signs of appropriation would I find? Did the elaborate concepts have an influence on the surroundings? Were the buildings still used as originally planned?