The Lake Como Design Festival is a cultural spree held every fall among the toothy hills of northern Italy. For the latest edition, the theme was lightness, and the stars of the show were fragile glassware, wispy textiles, swaying mobiles and spidery chairs. The program also included tours of some of the area’s treasured 20th-century architecture, buildings so free of monumentality and ornament that they almost seemed to float.
Yet there was nothing light about their origins. Much of Como’s rationalist architecture, as the Italian modernist style is known, was by young, experimental practitioners in the service of Mussolini. Chief among this group was Giuseppe Terragni (1904-1943), celebrated for his widely acknowledged masterpiece: the Casa del Fascio, or House of Fascism, the national party’s offices in Como.
These days, Mussolini is back in the spotlight. “M: Son of the Century,” an eight-part television series directed by Joe Wright, was screened in September at the Venice Film Festival and will be aired on Sky Italy starting Friday. Like the popular 2018 novel on which it is based, the series graphically anatomizes the fascist leader’s brutality as well as the charisma that catapulted him to power.
In an email, referring to the rise of authoritarian regimes, Wright described “M” as “a very political series with a great deal of pertinence for what’s going on today, not just in America, but across countries all over the world.” He added: “Making ‘M’ seemed a way, for me personally, of addressing the roots of this movement and learning about where it came from in order to face it now with much more consciousness.”
And what of the monuments that formed a backdrop to Mussolini’s regime and continue to provoke fascination? (Today, Italian travel companies regularly offer expeditions with names like the “Mussolini Imperial Architecture Tour,” taking in rationalist developments like the EUR neighborhood in Rome that was conceived in the 1930s as a celebration of fascism.)
There is no room for revisionism concerning the regime’s cruelty, but the Casa del Fascio and other buildings by Terragni and his circle show how complicated it can be to pass judgments on the intentions and messages of the architects who served it.
Designed in 1932 and completed in 1936, the Casa del Fascio embodied Mussolini’s description, in Terragni’s summation, of fascism as “a glass house into which everyone can peer.” Terragni situated the building across from Como Cathedral and gave it a detached skeletal frame. The wide, transparent entrance allowed people who gathered in the plaza in front to feel that they could merge with the powers inside.
Yet according to his admirers, Terragni did more than take Mussolini at his (highly dubious) word regarding transparency. He designed the Casa del Fascio to respond to the fluctuating, indeterminate movements of nature rather than the controlling gestures of totalitarianism. He wanted nothing to do with soaring columns, rigorous symmetry or neutralizing fields of white.
In the Casa del Fascio’s large, central atrium, Mike Dolinski, an American architect living in Como, pointed out how light bounced off polished marble, ceramic tile and glass, transforming what was originally a palette of pale greens, blues and black into a scintillating interplay of color.
All four of the building’s facades were given different window sizes and arrangements, regulating the sun’s thermal impact in each direction. The jazzy appearance of the south facade looks like a harbinger of Piet Mondrian’s “Broadway Boogie-Woogie” painted less than a decade later.
Terragni’s architecture “always subverts the idea of a singular order, subverts the idea of authority,” said the architect Daniel Libeskind, who did analytical drawings of the building while working as a student for one of Terragni’s great champions, the American architect Peter Eisenman.
“It’s a house for everybody, it’s open, it’s my place, it’s your place. It’s a symbol for every kind of class and political thinking,” said Attilio Terragni, whose grandfather, an engineer also named Attilio, was Giuseppe Terragni’s brother. (The younger Attilio, an architect, was part of the team that worked with Libeskind on the design of the Jewish Museum Berlin, an antifascist monument if ever there was one.)
Like Libeskind, Attilio Terragni argued for the Casa del Fascio’s inherent progressiveness. This attitude was honed, he said, by his uncle’s devotion to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s concept of the social contract, or the need for a society to agree to the laws by which it is governed.
But Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a New York University historian of fascism and the author of the book “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present,” was less willing to skim past the building’s raison d’être, especially now that Italy has its most right-wing government since World War II.
“The idea of fascism as a glass house implies principles of transparency that are the exact opposite of what it was,” she said. “Fascism was concealment of the truth because anyone who tried to tell the truth would be killed or put in prison.”
The Casa del Fascio was a building block of the regime, she continued. “These were the local fascist clubs, the headquarters where you would see propaganda films and news reels, where local policy would be discussed. You would have to try very hard to take the history of rationalism out of any context of fascism.”
Complicating today’s attitudes toward the building is the story of Terragni himself.
He was still a teenager in 1922, when Mussolini marched to Rome with an armed force of insurrectionists and secured power. Studying architecture in Milan, Terragni and a group of fellow students developed the principles of rationalism, a version of modernism that didn’t entirely reject classical forms or materials but instead made subtle references to them.
In 1927, Terragni joined the National Fascist Party and did army service in Italy. The next year, construction began on the first major rationalist structure in Italy, an apartment building near the Como waterfront called the Novocomum, which had the rounded contours of an ocean liner (its nickname was Il Transatlantico). To ensure that the city would approve the design, he submitted drawings of a facade with neoclassical ornament — pilasters, pediments, arched windows. These were purely a bluff. When the scaffolding came down, in 1929, and the deception was revealed, Como’s fine arts commission demanded that the promised embellishments be added. Terragni stood his ground, and the building remained unadorned if undeniably lush.
Terragni formed alliances with other architects who had roots in Como, most notably, Pietro Lingeri, with whom he designed several apartment houses in Milan and an unbuilt edifice that paid homage to Dante’s “Divine Comedy.” Completed in 1944, Lingeri’s layered and elegantly skeletal Villa Leoni, in Ossuccio, overlooking Lake Como, is a rationalist beauty with an obvious debt to the Casa del Fascio.
In the early days of his dictatorship, Mussolini had encouraged artistic innovation as a rebuttal to Italy’s reputation for cultural backwardness. His lover, the journalist and art critic Margherita Sarfatti, saw in rationalism a balance between the heavy hand of Golden Age nostalgists and the dizzy imaginings of Futurists. (Modern architecture does not have a role in the series “M,” which largely plays out in palatial rooms with fringed lampshades and gaudy crystal chandeliers. But you can see its influence at the periphery. After Mussolini secures the job of prime minister, Sarfatti is shown roaming his lavish home in Rome, declaring, “Let’s get rid of these dark and dusty colors. Everything needs to reflect change.” Later, she is portrayed in her own living room, each surface announcing its modernity with abstract patterns.)
Sarfatti eventually commissioned Terragni to design a monument for her son Robert, who died in World War I. Giuseppe and his brother Attilio had already completed a municipal memorial to soldiers who fell in the Great War. Unveiled in 1932, the Monumento ai Caduti in Como was based on the futurist architect Antonio Sant’Elia’s sketch for a power plant. Terragni built the minimalist monument to Robert Sarfatti from stone slabs on a plateau in Asiago in 1935.
His commission for the Casio del Fascio came in 1932 through Attilio, later the fascist mayor of Como. Giuseppe, devoted to contemporary art, ordered an abstract mural from his friend, the avant-garde artist Mario Radice, for the wall of the main conference room and designed the modern, tubular steel armchairs that surrounded the conference table. These chairs, named Lariana, were arranged everywhere except at the head of the table, where a giant portrait of Mussolini attached to the wall behind it gave the impression that Il Duce was eternally presiding.
“Presiding as a two-dimensional image in this three-dimensional space,” Libeskind said with a laugh.
Terragni’s career did not last long, and Mussolini swiveled toward bombastic monumentalism as his preferred building style. In 1943, four years after Mussolini and Hitler signed the Pact of Steel formalizing their alliance, Terragni was called back to military service and sent to the Eastern Front as an artillery commander. He returned to Como shattered.
“He died of post trauma from electroshock,” a dangerous therapy at the time, his great-nephew said, adding that rumors that Terragni committed suicide out of guilt over his fascist allegiances were part of a campaign by admirers to rescue his reputation after the war. He was 39. Mussolini would fall from power six days later.
The Casa del Fascio was targeted for demolition in the 1950s. Yet Bruno Zevi, a Jewish architect and critic, headed a long line of leftist eminences who noisily defended the building and its creator.
Since 1957 the Casa del Fascio has been the headquarters of the Guardia di Finanza, the Italian financial police. The building, which is open to the public by special arrangement, remains intact. The once-colorful interior paint is now white, and the black marble ceiling at the entrance is ravaged. But visitors can still climb the front staircases with their sinuous glass side walls and feel suspended in a shimmering cube.
An organization called MAARC, the Virtual Museum of Abstract and Rationalist Art in Como, has waged a campaign to turn the building into a museum and study center for 20th-century art and architecture. But Attilio Terragni said it is better off as it is. The Guardia di Finanza is not under the municipality’s jurisdiction and doesn’t have to conform to building codes, which he believes would bring more damage than clarity to his uncle’s vision.
The question remains how to frame that vision
Ben-Ghiat, the N.Y.U. historian, suggests a simple plaque describing the Casa del Fascio’s legacy would be a service. “I think it’s important that it keeps its original name as a historical document, a site of memory,” she said.
