Office complex “The Corner”

By Valerio Paolo Mosco - 2 October 2019
Schüco, 3F Filippi, Guardian Glass have participated in the project

An issue of Casabella during the 1930s carries an article on what at the time was called “building reconfiguration”. We are shown several buildings, for the most part small 19th Century town houses, stripped of their brick façades and given a modern-style facelift: stark white cladding devoid of moldings, and horizontal openings that just stopped short of being strip windows. Unintentionally, the article heralds a theme that would become a key tenet of post-modern architecture. But let us take things in order. In the second half of the 1960s, Robert Venturi published his book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, which would revolutionize architectural thinking. Venturi’s thesis was based on a logical sequence, which at the time appeared faultless: modern architecture had failed because it had not taken into account two paradigms, which, if one excluded the more radical Renaissance, underpinned the whole of western architecture, i.e. complexity and contradiction. In his delicately ironic throwaway style, Venturi accused the modern movement of rejecting what in fact was the natural difference between the outer and inner aspect of a building. This led him to draw an important conclusion: if the distinction between the exterior and interior of a building was a self-evident fact, then the two environments should play different roles - the interiors should concentrate on domestic life while the exterior should be part of the public realm. Venturi lived in the heyday of pop art, advertising hoardings and the aesthetics of consumption. As a result, his programs were of hyper-domestic interiors and hyper-pop exteriors. But leaving aside Venturi’s mixed architectural exploits, the dogma sanctioning the equivalence between the outer façade and interior of a building was definitively laid to rest and from its ashes rose a new zeal for the urban role of the façade, now appreciated as a key player shaping a city’s...