Blog 7

Guiseppe Terragni”s Casa del Fascio in Como is quite rightly regarded as one of the seminal buildings of the “heroic period” of Modern Architecture. Designed in 1932, when Terragni was just 28, it has become world famous for its proportional system, its transparency, the layering of its different facades, as well as the clear expression both of its structure and its function. But it is a difficult building for Modernists as well, for no matter how much you focus on form and space, there’s no escaping that this was the local headquarters of Mussolini’s Fascist party. Modernism has been seen predominantly as an expression of liberal social democratic ideologies and yet here is one of its icons celebrating a totalitarian regime.

As a result of the quality of Terragni’s architecture, many have sought to excuse his complicity with those who were in power in Italy while he was working, but he would have been appalled at this suggestion of double standards. Like many of his contemporary young Italian architects, he was an enthusiastic and committed Fascist and he regarded the Casa del Fascio commission as a great honour. He described the building as “a glasshouse” in which there was “no encumbrance, no barrier, no obstacle, between the political hierarchy and the people,” while the continuous row of doors in the centre of the main facade were designed to spring open simultaneously, not to welcome the public in, but to allow a troop of Fascist guards to form up in the central atrium and then march out of the building into the city, without breaking formation. Mussolini himself attended the opening and spoke to the crowd below from the first-floor balcony, while a giant image of him was projected on the blank panel to his side.

It remains both a fascinating piece of architecture and an equally fascinating relic of a once hugely popular and now entirely discredited Italian political movement.