Tags: sicily sicilia agrigento detour
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Tags: palermo
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casa del mutilato, veterans' house, palermo, italy, 1935-1938.
architect: giuseppe spatrisano (1899-1985)
finding an angle from which this strangely haunting piece of fascist metafisica would have been portrayed in the 1930's and making a black and white of it simply proved too tempting.
I remember thinking that all I needed to complete the picture was the ubiquitous italian bombers of fascist photography, but no one ever really needed those - we mustn't forget how the italians bombed ethiopia with chemical weapons when ethiopian resistance to occupation turned out to be more than the italian army could handle. in fact, once you've read about it, you can't forget.
anyone who loves italy has a tendency to downplay the crimes of the 1930's and 40's - after all this was not germany - and the same tendency is true of a disheartening number of italians. for architects, the dilemma is not dissimilar. great architecture came out of fascist italy. great architects were given public commissions, a rare event even in the finest of democracies.
although much work has been put into developing the architecture of democratic institutions since the war, there is no real conflict between architecture and power, even absolute power - a fact which should make us wonder less at the spectacle of italian razionalismo and more at why german architecture of the nazi era was so bad in comparison.
the italians were the creative geniuses of fascist europe and their architects led the way. in doing so, they lent respectability to a criminal cause. they gave it dignity and beauty.
of course, not all of italy's fascist architecture is good. a whole line grew from art deco and american streamline and much of it reeks of petit bourgeois taste. and there is the heavy handed, gloomy neo-baroque of which palermo has plenty. it has such menacing presence and inhuman scale that you feel you can deduce every crime commited by its builders from the stones alone...
but the urbanism was conservative which can be a good starting point, the programmes for public building were impressive, and the classicism - the stripped down, abstract classicism - was often brilliant.
it also did what classicism does best: it made fine architects out of mediocre ones as I believe was the case with giuseppe spatrisano and his veterans' house. I have been able to find very little of his other work - none of it has the power and simplicity of this building which is also by nature a memorial.
spatrisano learnt about absence from de chirico and the school of pittura metafisica, and the oculus of his memorial courtyard must surely have been understood as a missing dome in earthquake-bound sicily. the roofless church is a great image of loss as tarkovsky would later remind us.
that the fascists should celebrate the victims of the great war which brought them to power is no surprise but all societies must remember. the particular sadness of the casa del mutilato remains that the italian state was making new mutilati by the hour and against all reason at the time of its construction.
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Tags: giuseppe spatrisano casa del mutilato palermo sicily sicilia italy italia architecture rationalism rationalist razionalismo razionalista modernism modernist fascism fascist fascismo architektur architettura Architectuur arquitetura Arquitectura jenskristianseier seier+seier creative commons CC
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the carlo scarpa set.
Tags: palermo carlo scarpa architecture
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