Brutal harmony

The Escheresque Italian villa designed by Fausto Bontempi for sculptor Claudio Caffetto

- ADAM STECH

Villa Caffetto reads like a manifesto for sculptural architecture. Built in the 1970s for Italian artist Claudio Caffetto, this extraordinary house, near Brescia in Lombardy, is a striking composition of geometric shapes and oblique forms in concrete, glass and metal that are as visually intricate as Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s famous etchings of ancient staircases.

Conceived within a landscape still strongly embedded in the brutalism movement, but displaying some characteristics of the increasingly popular postmodernist and high-tech genres, Villa Caffetto was designed by little-known architect Fausto Bontempi, who was strongly influenced by Carlo Scarpa, his teacher at Venice architecture school IUAV. After graduating, he took a job at Lombardy’s department of urban planning, working on regulatory plans for the municipalities of Lake Garda while, at the same time, he designed a few experimental houses and other projects of his own around the lake.