Urban Counterpoints Modern living meets Lombardian pragmatism（上）

Prologue

Di Giovanni Muzio often remembers the attendance of friends’ painters, studies on the city and the library with the many treatises of ancient architecture. Nominating Gio Ponti one immediately thinks of the inhabited windows and the search for a modern home pursued in the long run of the Domus magazine. The writings on the interpretation of the history of the city remain fundamental, as is Moretti's ancient art, reinterpreted in the editorials of Space with the sensitivity of the modern city. The abstract paintings painted by Mario Asnago are often compared to the compositions of their facades, which Antonioni used as scenography’s cinematographic. The Magistretti lamps still present in many Milanese salons, as the full-height doors by Ignazio Gardella are now a symbol of lightness and elegance. In the understatement of a more or less signed by Caccia Dominioni we can recognize projects that occur in the dust of the yard and ideas that share the friends to whom you make the home. It is a cross-section of a way of working, like the eighty houses that sixty-eight architects built in Milan in fifty years; among these authors names found, famous names always, names rediscovered recently, fashion architects or considered minor. Each house represents a design research in itself, in which it is certainly possible to trace personal poetics, but which we can above all read as pieces of a recognizable corpus, born in a particular moment, result of a cultural environment that has ancient origins and modern influences Eighty houses are not an entire city, but they are an already sufficient selection of architectures, in particular residential buildings, to form the image of modern Milan, entering the existing urban fabric. Not monuments or public representative buildings, therefore, but homes to abide, to rethink the city through an attitude of great attention to the context, which characterized the arc of the fifty years taken into consideration without interruption.

In 1923 he inaugurated what would later be called Ca 'Brütta, a large urban condominium fragment, created by a young Palladio scholar, Giovanni Muzio; fifty years later, works seem to close this experience: a refined architect like Umberto Riva is the last heir of a tradition of constructive detail that spreads in his home in via Pravia, while a well-known designer like Vico Magistretti, in the block facing San Marco, recovers historicist styles through the design trait. Between these two dates we build the Modern Milano that today many study and the eighty houses have become over time, in the circle of European architects, fruitful references and object of reflection to talk about urbanity and context, shape and structure, language and materiality of co-operative details or of internal flexibility and spatiality, but above all they are re-read today as an example of a solid European, bourgeois and industrial city that has strongly supported this architecture. It is no coincidence, perhaps, that the city of Zurich for a couple of decades has undertaken research and monographic studies on our city.

Muzio, Ponti, Portaluppi, Lingeri and Terragni already between the two wars, Asnago and Vender, Caccia Dominioni, Gardella and Minoletti, with many others, in the post-war, are the protagonists of this season, but the houses provide us with their own architecture lessons, showing in this segment of time the consolidation of some residential types and their subsequent variation as well as the slow refinement of the volumetric decomposition, aimed at recovering the ancient morphological variety that the nineteenth-century city of the great size had flattened. The rich industrial bourgeoisie, the first most traditionalist, will be more modern during the boom years, and will pursue this task with pride, allowing clients, architects, companies and craftsmen to work together. A world, and above all a profession, largely disappeared in the following years.

Each house is told through a photograph by Stefano Topuntoli, photographer always attentive to the relationship with the context, and designs ranging from urban planimetry through plants and elevations, up to the matter of the rises to allow a comparison between the works. Their teaching, which deals with topics that are still current in the contemporary project, can therefore be divided into three design lessons: the planimetric layouts of urban themes, the typical typology and spatial nations of living and their views of the city, with an epilogue on constructive detail.

First lesson: Judicious couplings

Traces of cities, figures never isolated, always complementary to the context, this is the first characteristic that we can recognize in many of these works, a way in which the new architecture integrates and combines with a particular "urban" character of the city, solid and severe, already formed with the Counter-Reformation, and then consolidated with Piermarini and the subsequent projects of the Commission of Ornato in the neoclassical period.

The research conducted on urbanity at the beginning of the twentieth century was already a tradition of almost unconscious work, with which the architects naturally constructed the new city, dominating a rich repertoire of compositional instruments, learned in continuity with the historical experience and as a hand you find yourself surrounded by modern sensibility.

The experimentation for large urban fragments that the architects of the twenties and thirties are facing as new issues, when replacing and thickening the central parts of the city once occupied by villas and historic gardens is not very different in the themes of reconstruction for urban tracks that the bombardments of the Second World War had left. In both cases these projects are the occasion of a reasoning on a larger scale of the individual area of relevance, with a tension that links constructive detail to the urban form, the tradition of urban residence with the typological experimentation of modernity. Because of their exemplary character, rather than parts of the cities, they are fragments, evoking "fragments" of ideals: Only, indeed, splinters of architectural ideas compose the mosaic of the city as disparate tesserae. At a time like the present one, where we return to build on the built and the consolidation of consolidated fabrics seems to be the primary objective for the saving of soil, the modern Milan interventions in the ancient context are precious examples.

Urban tradition and new interventions

Both the oldest and the nineteenth-century cities in Milan had a long tradition of research on the theme of the dwelling and its relationship with the urban design of the road: the austere noble palaces, which during the Counter-Reformation had renewed with great courts the minute weave of the ancient fabric, always interweaving the representative character with the domestic one. In the neoclassical course of Venice, we compare the opposite characteristics of living: the urban setting of Palazzo Rocca Saporiti and the severe introversion of Palazzo Bovara. In the ancient villages, such as the Ticinese, it is still legible a less urban fabric, less stately, dense with simple railings or rest houses. The Milanese residential types were therefore well known to our architects, as well as their traditional façade elements, the regular pitch of vertical windows, and the gradualness of the private public relation, which is affirmed in the characteristic and exemplary of the internal courts. Milanese architecture is the urban vision of the whole that the neoclassical city had anticipated with the works of the Commission of Ornato, born in the Napoleonic era for the regularization of the existing consolidated in the verification of the architectural quality of the new urban interventions; his Plan of the Reptiles (1807), the first regulatory plan for the city, the "open city" as defined by urban planner Finetti, represents the recovery of the Roman orthogonal mesh and its open plot on the territory, that the AR plan (1945 ) will resume in the proposal for post-war crime.

Ideas and overall visions that are embodied in individual homes and their careful deposits: the history of the city of Milan is nothing but the continuous struggle between two opposing ideas, on the one hand the vocation to be the center of a relationship system , the widest and most widespread distribution in the territory, the possible Lombard polycentric city, which in the regular mesh found origin and confirmation in the Plan of 1807, and on the other hand the inexorable closure of the concentric rings of the medieval walls, of their moat that will become the channel of the Navigli and, subsequently, of the circle of the Spanish Bastions, to accentuate a monocentrism reiterated by the urban expansions of the plans Beruto (1884-1889) and Pavia Masera (1912). A tension between two city hypotheses, albeit not so obviously operational, that will remain as a conceptual reference for many design choices.

The criticism has often focused on the repeated failure in the twentieth century of an overview of intervention on the city, on the fragmentation and occasionalist of the detailed plans of the Plan of Reconstruction (1949) in the historical fabric after the bombardments of the war and the delays of the plan regulator of 1953. Only recently, on the occasion of the review of Cino Zucchi for the Venice Biennale (2014) with "Milan, the modern laboratory" the value of the best examples of an experience, unique in Europe, of integration between ancient and modern. The adaptation of an abstract modernity to a structured context, has enriched an otherwise repetitive rule with complexity and it is thus possible to read "the urbanization of modern architecture" and the process of "decomposing and recompacting its morphology" seen as exemplary.

The large staircase is the street curtain/la grande scala e la cortina stradale

The first example of this lesson is the Ca 'Brütta by Giovanni Muzio, his urban block announces themes waiting for new answers: a building of high scale, with an important urban density and the resulting complexity lead to break down the building block in more bodies and an internal road; multiplying the figure of the house on the whole of the front, it becomes evident the need for an almost abstract design, on the regular series of windows as if it were a picture to be composed with light and dark, with backgrounds, sign weights, which only the recent restoration he returned us with perfection. A solution that well represents the author's awareness of the urban impact of the new dimension; its "piece" of the city accentuates the compact character with the choice of simplifying the projections of the residences on the street and reducing the depth of the façade to a floor; to chromatically draw the sequence of the individual facades, one different from the other, Muzio sacrifices the articulation of the apartments, which can only find in the inner courtyard the way of jutting and obtaining rounder spatiality. Drawing cities with architecture has always been the main theme of Muzio's theoretical research: the large blocks of Piazza della Repubblica or Via Sandri, which with the use of brick and their C-shaped layout stand as urban "cantonal”, are well-known examples of a research carried out also in the post-war period, when, professor of urban planning at the Faculty of Engineering of the Polytechnic, he used to travel with students in the capitals of northern Europe. An interest and an influence traceable both in the small block of Via Vincenzo Monti, where the houses in line are closed to compose a large green court, as in the more isolated INA of Via Andrea Doria, where the morphology is composed of the repetition of a segmented dark brick residential block, with a corner window that much owes to the light research of the Scandinavian cities.

The work of Muzio introduces us to a project research that will be pursued by other architects who worked in Milan, according to various attitudes, in many projects before and after the war. We could almost hypothesise that many Milanese houses were conceived with an exemplary vocation: in the cases less bound to the area's grounds, less determined by the place where the work is inserted, it is possible to recognize the search for an ideal figure, a figurative code, as if the architect wanted to prefigure an urban image in balance between the traditional road and the modern city, foreseeing and checking relationships with the different road calibers: fronts or volumes led to new roads, side elevations or even introverted closes. Just think of the work of Gio Ponti for the "typical houses" of via de Togi and Letizia, for the homes of Città Studi, with balconies excavating on the oil, the volumetric joints of the Marmont house, up to the two volumes of Rasini. This last work, conceived with Emilio Lancia seems to exemplify the ability of Milanese architecture to get in tune with the context, solving on the one hand the neoclassical course with a stereocomico in white marble and on the other the facade on the Ramparts with the image of a tower in bricks.

The architects of rationalism, with the plastic decomposition of the volumes, will put the idea of the street curtain in a more explicit crisis, without ever completely denying it. The thought goes to Corso Sempione, when Terragni arranges the two blocks orthogonal to the road and keeps them together with the sole ternazze or, a few decades later when Piero Bottoni overlooks the big modern boulevard only the head of the big blade of the INA palazzo, to gather a fragment of the project of rationalist architects for the Millano Verde. Once again, two solutions in which modernity is compromised with tradition: in the first case with the idea of the classic building that the texture of the catwalk draws on the front of the Rustici house, in the second aligning the single lower body course and leading back, through cuts vertically, the north face of the great UN out of scale to a more traditional figure of a turreted wall. A short distance to the center, the theme of the angle between two streets of different caliber, such as the monumental axis and a side road, had been solved by the Latis brothers with the fragmentation in three factory buildings, the major oriented on the course , a lower body in a backward line on the way and a balanced block on the road that connects them again non schematic solution, which knows how to differentiate the parts and at the same time keep them together thanks to the theme of the string course on which to slide the septa walls. The occupation of the historic gardens the villas and the redefining of internal fronts The urban development between the two wars in Milan sees a large part of the construction of the strip between the Cerchia dei Navigli and the Bastioni, an area often occupied by convents and palaces with their extensive historical gardens. Particular design occasions, which produced exceptional answers, as in the case of the Serbelloni palace garden, with the spectacular interpretation of Andrea an architecture that becomes ruin, which emerges bare and modern from a heavy and torn travertine base on Via Serbelloni or dig into the exaggerated plastic possibilities of the worked brick of Palazzo Fidia.

In other contexts, as in the Figini and Pollini houses in the Perego garden, the theme of overlapping villas is introduced, which will find its best outcome only in the post-war period, when a typological theme will turn into a problem of architectural composition. In the case of via dell'Annunciata, the overlapping of a same type floor allows to align a series of balconies that excavate the volume, imprinting a split and a rotation of the residual face towards the internal garden, in a modern declension of the traditional hide from the street noble part of the block. A cut and a breakdown that will then be taken up and used by many designers later, to express the breaking of the building curtain, a compositional capacity for factory buildings and a consequent take away from the nineteenth-century facade city. In this same period begins the parceling of the garden of Arcadia by Giuseppe de Finetti, finished only at the beginning of the fifties with the houses of Ignazio Gardella and Giulio Minoletti, here the view on the green offers architects the possibility to experiment joints volumetric that in the Berutian curtain it was difficult to implement: the freedom with which de Finetti digs in backward terraces the corner of the Casa della Meridiana is equal to the lightness with which Gardella opens its verandas on the historic garden.

To these places, in the Sixties, a redesign of via Cavalieri del Santo Sepolcro was added, on the gardens between the ancient palaces and cloisters of San Simpliciano, with the insertion of a sequence of new architectures; hidden behind the facades of the ancient noble palaces of via Pontaccio, this intervention demonstrates a more free experimental will in the green, and more reserved on the historical road. The sequence of the pieces by Vietti, Caccia Dominioni and the three fragments of the BBPR study compose a new urban layout, adapted to the severe, quiet volume of San Simpliciano. The planning attitudes are very different: despite the common use of a language of prefabricated elements in the works of the architects of the Torre Velasca in Vietti, the urban solutions are opposite, the corner on the Via San Simpliciano is solved with a compact volume and façade repetition of the trilithic elements, which opens into large loggias on the garden, while the terraces of the BBPR houses seem to enter a completely opposite dialectic with the context, not opposing, but leaning against the modularity of the grit panels resolving the front with terraces climb to the green. The Pirelli house of Caccia Dominioni takes part in this set design, with a certain detachment. Many urban pieces see different architectures and poetics confront each other: one of the few proposals for morphological differentiation introduced by the pianoforte Beruto, a system of single-family houses that rhythmize the axis of via XX Settembre, is attested on the crossroads with via Monti with four signed works: a very young Gardella introduces modern living in the expansion of Villa Borletti, Mino Fiocchi builds a stone nut for the Falck family, Caccia Dominioni offers a Lombard reinterpretation of the cottage, while Marco Zanuso works with the modularity of trachyte slabs on a structure in exposed concrete, lightened only by domesticity by inserting large bow-window windows towards the internal garden. Four cantons, viewed from above from the Tower to the Park

New dimensions of living: large scale and height growth

The reasons for the land rent, with the evident speculative intentions will lead to a densification that the architects were forced to interpret, sometimes with buildings in height in very central contexts, almost hidden the Monforte tower in via Mascagni, other times with freer bodies as Magistretti in via Revere, where the tower becomes an urban landmark on the railway. In the continuous comparison between large scale, height of the buildings and their impact on the existing city, during the reconstruction the theme of the continuity of the wire, roadside gutter has been the subject of debate, design experimentation in the first realizations, to finally materialize in accordance urban planning Figini and Pollini in via Broletto, while retaining the traditional theme of the path that runs through the courtyards to the garden, a sequence that is still easy to recognize in the ancient urban structure of via Cappuccio, solve the volumetric consistency in a tower of vertical development throughout inside the block, almost invisible in the urban landscape: the delicate travertine front on the Via Broletto introduces a complex in which the height of the internal volume stands out thanks to the lightness of the frame system, where grids, lines, portals, walls, glass cement, they appear on the front like a collage of artistic avant-gardes. The master plan of 1953 assimilates the experiments already carried out for detailed plans and regulates the theme of the eaves, determining the continuity of height on the ancient road, which contrasts, towards the inside of the block, a building of greater volume: Asnago and Vender in via Lanzone, like the Latis brothers, had made it exemplary in the design of the various facades that the planimetric arrangement of two orthogonal bodies was used to perform, digging large vertical, elegant and traditional windows in the Biancone marble of the road body in their proportions, and horizontally cutting the body behind in colored klinker with long ribbon windows.

It is not necessary to remember that architects like Luigi Moretti or Ernesto Nathan Rogers used to express their theoretical attitude through the cultural debate in magazines: Moretti publishes only seven issues of Spazio, but its editorials can today be considered as a real theory of architectural composition, perhaps the most hiari texts to reconstruct a formal culture transversal to the various arts that plasti. Rogers instead, through the pages of his Casabella-Continuità reasoned on a correct adherence to modernity in respect of the past. Nevertheless, the urban culture and knowledge of the history of the norn cities were transformed into abstract critical reflections, but into the reality of ope realta of works that reconstructed the image of Milan. Just think of the area of the Torre Velasca, where we can compare two examples of reconstruction: in the block facing the Asnago tower and Vender have chosen to continue the morphology of the traditional block, which impose a larger scale and a language consistent with a new dimension of modernity, while the BBPR studio adopts a new type, the skyscraper, and transforms it into a tower, with the past references to which the term would allude, had it not been transformed into an experimental constructive language by the structures of Arturo Danusso.

Interventions in the historical fabric

Observing pieces of the city where more than one work is compared, allows the architects to choose between many urban stories. On the central section of Corso Italia there are two very complex works, which present very different choices: the large sequence of blocks that Luigi Moretti realizes in the wake of the hotel houses and the sinuous intervention that Luigi Caccia Dominioni weaves between the plot of the historical fabric. It is one of the oldest areas of Milan, recognizable in its Urbis form by the double sign of the walls of the Roman quadrilateral, the current via Di Sciplini, blessed by the most recent opening of the Corso Italia radial: if Moretti seems to turn her back. Moretti studies a subdivision of apparently almost schematic parallel bodies in their modernity, which intensify and take on greater volumetric complexity when they face the street, with the well-known overhanging projecting body: a striking gesture, the rotation of the building that Moretti imposes on Italy, a typical monumental curtain played on the façade design, an eclectic axis that had massacred one of the few still preserved corners of the Roman walls. In doing so, the Roman architect shows a bow on the course, the needle of a compass that allows the main body to be seen, backward and broken, with the analytical design of the lodges of the residences. The sketches of study, both planimetric and perspective perception of this project, underline, in their reproduction of the complexity of the context, the attention placed by Moretti by location; perhaps less known is the history, though equally significant, of its northern front, which in the first municipal practice had been solved as a trivial back, with a grid that would have hidden vertically the technical parts of the building. In the verification of the model published in Spazio, in the moment in which the back is an urban facade on Via Rugabella, Moretti works it in a sculptural way, cutting and modulating horizontal signs in musical counterpoint with the small notes of the technical windows. Caccia Dominioni works instead of ambiguity: on the course it offers a peaceful, traditional image, even taking up a familiar urban image, with the two wings framing a low body on the front line and a larger behind. A reference to an anonymous figure, the sostra, which with its mixed function, residential above and technique below, historically has marked the view over the water: Caccia chooses therefore the medieval city of the circle of the Navigli, while Moretti defends the potential of the opening of the Roman dialect on the territory. However, if you look carefully at the last front that makes up the view of the hunting complex on the road, you can guess its actually the back of a volume that grows with greater consistency towards the innermost part of the block, creating a half-open on the green, which finds its position in lean on the axis of vi Discipline, ancient tracing of the Roman walls, and whose pivot is marked by the black volume of the central tower. Between the street and the real back garden, there is a courtyard at altitude, which allows unexpected apartments to look out. Caccia make his historicist choice ironic, while offering us a lesson in architectural and urban composition in the study of living spaces, with the plants of this great block articulated in complex spatial sequences. An idea of living in which the theme of distribution, with its compresses and dilatations, also resolves dilatations, also solves the interlocking of the broken sections of the factory buildings, with the insertion of loggias, projections and horizontality that contrast with the peremptory vertical of the glossy volume in black klinker of the central tower, pierced only by small windows. Caccia, who has studied the hierarchy of heights in the relationship with the church in front, manages to make a consistent urban piece without resorting to the building in height, opposing himself to the choice of Moretti to mediate with the volumes on the road and condense the majority volumetric of the double body that stands behind the apse of Sant'Eufemia. If the case of Corso Italia is one of the most successful examples of two great masters of integration in the context, it is true that Milan sees at the same time perhaps more schematic solutions of densification, such as the Bianchi area or the De Angeli Frua district, but which certainly did not have negative effects on the urban landscape and still remain today pleasant places to live, demonstrating that the forced inclusion in the context of a house designed for the middle class, has allowed a sweeter absorption of the modern and at the same time has offered the possibility of more experimental planimetric compositions.

Rarefied urban situations

In the sixties the work on the living space loses this unique, exceptional character of adapting to the different occasions that context offers, to articulate, in Zanuso, Magistretti or Gregotti, Meneghetti and Stoppino, in less central areas, with a work on the form that will influence the formal results, in that close and continuous relationship between the ways of living and their urban outlook. If in Zanuso the module is so much prefabricated that it measures the spaces, and in the building of via Palmanova the module seems to be dedicated only to the external cladding, in the case of the complex of via Muratori of the Passarelli studio the morphological choice to move away from the road makes possible to design a coherent residential system. These buildings are affected by a technological research that also characterizes the image: the theme of the passage of plants and vertical distributions become autonomous figures and materials; all set on a 90 cm module. the main towers are located at the center, to accommodate the living rooms and the rooms of two apartments, whose services overlook the central cavity, the smaller towers contain one or two smaller apartments, while the kitchens the stairs become the connecting elements of the composition. The modular character of the plant is shown on the front with the material difference of wood, brick, lamella and cement, accentuating the volumetric character of the parts; the Roman architects thus define an urban landscape with its own language, which makes the repetition of volumes strongly characterized by its figurative strength, by now no longer seeking a relationship with the context.

Second Lesson: Restless space

The young post-war couples they had lunch in triangular spaces in apartments close to the fair the glasses had circles on the curtains the furniture was linear, with little books the guest who had brought some chianti we drank in glasses of green glass he was the first Sicilian of my life we were his model of development. -Luciano Erba

Which plants correspond to the urban experiments seen? What are the transformations on the ways of living? The research that springs from the controlled spaces of the Ca'Brütta, through de Finetti's raumplan, up to the domus of Gio Ponti, finds fulfillment before the Second World War in the houses of Terragni and Lingeri, which make the typological plant ductile , bent to absorb the emptying and the play of urban volumes, which only in the Giuliani Frigerio house in Como will regain compactness in unity. After the war the research on living spaces is more risky, we could talk about mannerism for the safety of an acquired language and its variations, considering also the widest and most free cut of the apartments. The houses of Gardella, Minoletti, Caccia Dominioni, Magistretti or Morassutti, in fact, were freed from the theme of the minimal house, which had characterized the arrival of modernity and can afford, with a suitable commission, a more complex search for living. It is usual to identify the Ca 'Brütta as the first Milanese "condominium" and it is precisely this residential dimension that we have chosen to investigate; not the minimal houses, therefore, very interesting, but which would deserve another scale of reasoning, but a bourgeois and collective way of living that finds a synthesis in the single building, large enough to have consistency with the context. These eighty homes to live also represent, in our opinion, a good casuistry of distributive themes, often anticipated by the masters, but then developed with extreme interest even lesser-known figures, useful today to outline the high quality of the profession at that time. From the typological point of view, a good architecture spread therefore, in which the personal gesture is less important, in favor of a research that deals with more strictly planimetric questions, how to enter, how to climb the apartment, how to live in its interiors.

From the city to the home, between urbanity and domesticity

In the Milanese houses one enters always climbing some steps, usually of stone marble: a first sign of the role that the entrance already had in the nineteenth-century city, set on large hallways, stone bases and raised ground floors. As is well known, this threshold between urbanity and domesticity is often found in the encounter between the coldness of its marble and the warmth of wood, the dark of linoleum and the transparency of glass, its synthesis. In trying to trace a small history of mediation spaces, we find that, if in the first houses studied the entrance space and treated as a representative interior, in modern architecture the ground attack takes on an autonomous character, breaking up the typological structure and the urban volume, as in the Rustici and Tognella houses, or in the residence of Via Giulianova di Lingeri; here, as in via Lanzone, or in Viale Papiniano, the entrance finds a greater emphasis on the side streets. Another design solution is the emptying of the ground floor, as the public space of the road that enters the house in via Canova di Belotti, until it becomes an entrance portico: an example is the complex section of the commercial road of Bottoni's pilotis in Corso Sempione la solution of the ground attack of the building of via Turati dei Latis, where the commercial street walk is protected by the only shelter, which divides the residences from the other functions, while the portico, more monumental, is inside the garden and coherent with the choice of facing, let's say, correctly orientate the apartments in the living area; finally, the very traditional portico that penetrates from via Verga to the heart of the house, to be contrasted with the monumental bastion at the top of via San Marco, from whose first floor you have the only access to the apartments. Lastly, a unique example is represented by the entrance to the house in via Quadronno di Mangiarotti and Morassutti; a low volume, which can be reached by descending from the road and then passing a bridge towards the real house with its vertical distribution: a small journey of estrangement to get to the absolute domesticity of these perfect apartments in their plant, compact in the step of the rooms and fluid in living spaces. Although Albini had opened new routes for distribution to housing in its public housing, in the bourgeois condominium there are few variants related to vertical distribution, often confirming an internal staircase that distributes at least two lodgings. The three lodgings are reached when Muzio develops, already in via Ampère, the insertion of a third apartment, smaller, eventually to be divided and redistributed during construction; this custom of defining the cuts with future inhabitants will become in the boom years and especially in the houses of Caccia Dominioni, as we will see, the inspiration for compact urban compositions, which could accommodate a greater typological adaptability, still today very relevant topic. Moretti himself, presenting the flexibility of his Corso Italia complex on Spazio, underlines its constructive logic, based on cantilevered floors from 1.40 to 2.70 for the four variants of the position of the locks.

Living modernity: shaping interior space

A new living space seems to have characterized Italian modernity, just think that both his magazines still bear traces of it in the title: La Casa Bella and Domus. Just the director of the latter has continued to publish for decades the most advanced experiments the most elegant houses, relaunching the idea of an Italian home magazine revisited through the taste of modernity. It should also be remembered the role of diffusion played by the manuals on modern dwelling such as the one published in weekly cards by Diotallevi and Marescotti, which would thus have reached all the drawing tables of the designers.

Between Ponti's education and the problem of the public housing, we find again a particular declination of international modernity, reinterpreted through our living tradition. We can say that the analysis carried out on the living space is marked both by a survey on the distribution characteristics of new homes, on the relationship between the individual environments, on the role of the new technology and on the transformation of ways of use, as strong formal will, a unitary research that kept together furniture, art and figuration, as it appears precisely in the pages of Domus. Gio Ponti will be the one to draw arrows in his plants, to indicate the continuity of the flows between the rooms, in particular the living spaces; his house in via Dezza has become a manifesto, in which to recount the luminous character of these new spaces in a fleeting perspective, through the inhabited window, the façade that is seen from the inside. This consistency and education to taste, was accompanied by the need to undermine the statiticity of the sequence of traditional rooms, freeing themselves from the immobility of the good living room locked, to occupy a living space (living) in everyday life, in which the theme of the movement experimented from Le Corbusier in his single-family homes, it will be declined to the scale of collective housing.

Gardella's plants clearly return this road: the Tognella house in the Park divides the living area and the sleeping area into two staggered bodies, highlighting the repetitive character of the rooms and services, to which a compact front, dug only from the shadow small loggias and the continuity of floor to ceiling windows, which form vertical slits in the wall. This closed figure, coherent in plan and elevation, contrasts with the freedom of the living space, which is manifested in a light façade that moves between the trilithic system of the pillars, solidly leaning against the string course, to hybridize the usual figure of the rationalist undifferentiated frame. In the house in Via Marchiondi he works on the type of the overlapping villa to offer each floor a different planimetric solution; the house is set on an idea of block, vertical on the garden and compact thanks to the dark klinker of the lateral and rear fronts, where you access two to the loggia per floor: each of these is cut by a central distribution of the 'accommodation, a corridor of exceptional dimensions, a sort of gallery that divides the possible joints of living rooms and bedrooms. What is elsewhere a mundane corridor becoming a fulcrum here represented exceptional especially in his apartment on the top floor. The stays at this point freed from the logic of the seriality of the rooms, can have different sizes and shapes and above all move on the long and narrow loggia, overhanging the structure, which becomes a real autonomous body of facade, its lightness and transparency.

A beautiful and well-known photograph fixes this idea of living, showing in the foreground the lamp produced by Azucena, to tell of the close relationship with the arts, with design, with the mass production technique of new objects, designed by Gardella and Caccia Dominioni.

Those who in those years were known as serving spaces and spaces served, in the homes of Luigi Caccia Dominioni are put in crisis in their own definition and become occasions for the many possible spaces in which to be welcomed, recovering the tradition of the poché plan; every millimeter of the house has its use and the distinction of almost useless places, in favor of sequences, expansions and compressions of space. Every figure of his spaces is often due to a geometric shape, basically as we have seen in the houses of Muzio and, above all, of Aldo Andreani. This planimetric complexity is supported by a research dedicated to the needs of the different Milanese families and the relationship between interior and exterior is often resolved with an external compactness that would seem to allude to a certain closure of the Lombard character, which instead corresponds to a very effective light control on the different internal spatialities. There are many themes tackled by Caccia Dominioni in the houses he built starting from his palazzo in Piazza Sant'Ambrogio at the end of the forties: it must be said that even though some common features of his design poetry on interiors are clearly recognizable, every home of the most Milanese of these architects brings a different planimetric solution and deals with a different look at a usual distribution theme. If the apartments in Via Nievo always look for a direct relationship with the living space, in via Santa Croce sequence of spaces is more rhythmic, looking for a conclusion in the direction towards Sant'Eustorgio, until it becomes the complex plant of corso Italia, concatenation of autonomous spatial figures.

Modernity has therefore been absorbed by the tradition of the Milanese house in different ways: if in Gio Ponti the permeability of the rooms is still accentuated by the sequences of the walls, in Gardella it is emptied to leave space and transparency to occupy the space. , to his opposite Caccia Dominioni draws and insists on the shape and height of each space and on their relationship.