…[t]his competition, which is the meaning of all modern life, is profoundly expressed in architecture and the applied arts which, forming the environment in which we live and work, are the spiritual and material figure of our civilization

V Triennale di Milano 1933

Mario Sironi’s exhibition poster for the 1933 V Triennale di Milano encapsulated typical characteristics of Italian Fascist design: an angular and simple V character; sleek obsidian metallic textures; and nations’ flags in competition along the character’s edges, Italy and the Netherlands neck-in-neck above the rest. The exhibition catalog proclaimed, “[t]his competition, which is the meaning of all modern life, is profoundly expressed in architecture and the applied arts which, forming the environment in which we live and work, are the spiritual and material figure of our civilization.” The V Triennale was the first in the exhibition’s history to occur in Milan, and a new palace foregrounded by a concrete loggia, Giovanni Muzio’s Palazzo dell’Arte, was erected just to accommodate the event. Muzio’s Palazzo’s extensive use of iron and cement, uncharacteristic of Italian palaces, was symbolic that Italy’s “spiritual and material figure” was a recent construction, or at least, distant from classical heritage.

Ravings on “civilization” and “modern life” in art seem hackneyed to our relativistic attitudes on aesthetics. Today, the V Triennale program might be shrugged off as ideological “fluff” lacking any substantive basis. Of course, contemporary observers make aesthetic judgments often, so long as they’re appended with “in my opinion.” Nevertheless, architectural and design movements and fads can indicate shared feelings over art. Consider, in contrast, contemporary preferences expressed in the US toward architecture. A 2007 poll of Americans’ favorite architecture showed only 12 “modern-looking” steel and glass structures among the top 50. Most on the list were Gothic, Greek, and Neoclassical styles, as one architect noted, “it’s mostly Washington icons.” He added “[i]t’s the attachment people have to them, not that they’re necessarily great architecture.” 

Figure 1. Giovanni Muzio’s Palazzo dell’Arte, Fondazione La Triennale di Milano, Triennale Di Milano, p. 699.

Today, rational architecture in America is ordinarily viewed as cold, impersonal, lifeless, or detached from contemporary feelings. By contrast, in Fascist Italy of the 1930s, rational forms at the V Triennale were poised to “animate” observers’ spirit and nerves. In the words of the official catalog of the Trienniale, such rational forms would render its audience “intoxicated by the vast virile geometric beauty… [of Milan’s] squares and triangles chemically elaborated between splendid and diligent straight channels.” Among architects and designers in Italy of the time, the recurrence of references to similar aesthetic judgments and feelings attest to how the architectural movement was informed by and contributed to the development of a unique emotional community which went on to become emblematic of Italian Fascism.

Of course, there were different attitudes and feelings towards art in Fascist Italy. The director of the V Triennale, Gio Ponti, felt happy when interior design and exterior architecture harmonized to communicate and regulate nature. Many other authors in Ponti’s magazine, Domus: Architettura e Arredamento dell’Abitazione Moderna in Città e in Campagna, claimed to feel similarly. Others didn’t. However, if we notice continued agreements over how architecture and design made authors feel, can we conclude that particular forms, like concrete, genuinely made them happy? In other words, were common pronouncements of feeling more than just ideas? I argue yes. To truly understand why rationalism was so popular to many in Fascist Italy, I take Domus authors at their word on particular forms’ relationships to emotions, and vice-versa. It was much more complex than concrete = happy. Emotions in architecture and design in Domus were embedded in a tangled web of ideas, associations, experiences, and feelings. And these emotions were more than static universals.

Following historians of emotions like Barbara Rosenwein and Thomas Dixon, I consider emotions as complex, emergent, and multi-faceted social forms that change in their respective context. This means seeing “happiness” not as a primordial and transcendent condition, but as a messy, polyvalent, idiosyncratic, and changing state of being. Dixon characterizes emotions as “complex, emergent, [and] multi-component realities” that aren’t “self-evident unities.” Dixon casts a wide net in explaining emotions, characterizing them as “composites made up in intricate ways from words, categories, narratives, metaphors, images, moral beliefs, religious attitudes, visual representations, bodily responses, behaviours, public performances, subjective experiences, feelings and testimonies.” We can feel for any facet of life, even if this feeling is ambivalent.

Emotions are also intimately connected to our material world. Sarah Randles explains that we don’t only respond to our material world in emotion, but we also modify and create forms with intentions to “express, produce, and regulate emotion.” Material forms can acquire emotional meanings in their use, like a brick conveying political anger when thrown through a window. Essentially, Randles’ dialectic between material form and emotion means that objects are both receivers and transmitters of human emotion, and that emotions therefore constitute valuable sources for detecting how people in the past felt about their material world, experience, and each other. Material forms also carry historical baggage in their cultural contexts. A revolutionary and delightful painting in Renaissance Italy might be abhorrent and banal to observers centuries later. Material forms’ meaning might not be directly apparent, either. As I mentioned earlier, material forms can represent intricate systems of associations, beliefs, and feelings. Thus, deciphering the feelings associated with a material form often involves understanding numerous strands and relationships of meaning. As we’ll see, understanding Domus authors’ feelings on rationalism in Italy meant understanding beliefs on heritage, identity, and economic conditions.

Finally, I draw on Barbara Rosenwein’s “emotional communities” concept. Rosenwein likens emotional communities to social ones (ie., families and workplaces). In particular, emotional communities are formal or informal associations of people with shared interests, stakes, and ideally “systems of feeling.” These systems are the “emotions that they value, devalue, or ignore; the nature of the affective bonds between people that they recognize; and the modes of emotional expression that they expect, encourage, tolerate, and deplore.” Authors in Domus offer an example of an emotional community since many maintained writing in the magazine from its origins to the V Triennale. Moreover, their interests, values, and feelings were strikingly similar during this period. Therefore, narrowing in on Domus authors as a tight-knit emotional community can reveal their shared changing feelings on architecture and design. In the following sections, I do just that. I trace Domus as an emotional community through the magazine’s founding and central texts until the V Triennale, ultimately, to answer: why did architects and critics in Fascist Italy presume that rationalism in architecture and design would make people happy?

Feelings of Domus

Emotions were on everyone’s mind in Domus’ first year of publication in 1928. Gio Ponti kicked off the magazine with an infamous essay, “La Casa all’Italiana“, a tour de force in defining and directing an Italian architecture and design vision of reconciling traditional and contemporary forms. Above all, Ponti laid the rhetorical cement that other Domus authors reproduced to communicate their feelings about architecture and design. Therefore, “La Casa all’Italiana” is a useful interpretative key for examining other texts.

In “La Casa all’Italiana”, Ponti painted in emotion. Words like “glad,” “happy,” “simplicity,” “love,” and “comfort” decorated the text and act as critical signifiers in Ponti’s valorization of architecture and design. First, he claimed Italians are glad when they possess architecture that incorporates Italy’s natural landscape, skies, and seasons. Moreover, a “happy” home came from interior design and exterior architecture harmonizing to communicate and regulate nature. For example, large windows opened Italians’ homes to their natural environment. Second, Ponti followed modernists’ criticisms of excessive ornament in architecture and design. Ponti touted simplicity and lambasted “extravagance,” “vulgar splendor,” and “misguided plagiarism,” most apparent in imitations of traditional styles. He even associated architecture “stripped of vanity” with health. Third, Ponti considered comfort in the home as something “superior” to Le Corbusier’s infamous “machine a habiter,” that home of pure functionalism for humans’ basic needs. Ponti imagined comfort as a status Italians attained through his previous ideals of nature and simplicity, and not just their basic needs. This, he thought, enabled Italians to finally rest. And finally, Ponti termed love the synthesis of his tenets: the unification of nature, simplicity, and comfort in Italians’ homes.

Ponti’s intricate and polemical web of feeling dominated future Domus issues. In 1928 alone La Casa all’Italiana’s influence was apparent. In February, Luigi Piccinato  featured a country house, calling it a “happy example of modern Italian architecture.” The house was comfortable enough for an “easy and sweet” life, Piccinato thought. Engraved on the façade was the Latin text procul omnis clamor et ira, “all the clamor and rage are far away.” A few pages later, Alberto Francini praised the “happy simplicity” of a villa’s “naked” ivory-white façade. In particular, the open portico’s enchanting views and temperance of sunlight brought “grace and comfort.” Francini concluded the “happy” home’s “clear simplicity” of interior arrangement made it “comfortable, amiable, serene, and welcoming.” Later in the year, Enrico Griffini described an international style home’s “gay and serene… constructive clarity” and “spontaneous simplicity.” The home’s design– white, rectilinear, and lacking traditional ornament– allured a lingering gaze more appealing than traditional Italian coastal villas’ “infinite boredom,” “aesthetic bitterness and miserable… empty presumption.” Mario Fontana urged readers to “abhor imitation.” Fontana thought contemporary design was destined for inventors keen to Italians’ needs.

Figure 2. Rodolfo Preiswerk’s Basilea country house, “gay and serene in its constructive clarity” according to Griffini. In “Esempi Stranieri Modernissimi di Case Economiche,” by Enrico A. Griffini, Domus 3, 1928.

Clearly, Ponti’s original theses and feelings were echoed by a range of Domus authors. Ponti’s rejection of imitation, praise of simplicity and nature in architecture and design were taken up by Piacentini, Francini, Griffini, Felice, and Fontana– each furnishing their own interpretations of La Casa all’Italiana’s sentiment. Nevertheless, each author showed astonishing affinity in their feelings over particular forms and ideals: happiness and comfort came from nature and simplicity; imitation was a sort of false consciousness that was miserable, abhorrent, and emotionless; and invention was a sign of health. When Domus authors employed emotional terms, those feelings were typically mutable, qualified, or mixed with different emotions altogether: boredom could be “infinite,” misery could be “empty,” and a “happy” home could feel “comfortable, amiable, serene, and welcoming” all at once. Coincidentally, Domus authors framed emotions like architectural styles– neoclassicism might have typical elements and represent a general theme, but a transcendent and absolute ideal-typical neoclassicism doesn’t exist. To Domus authors, imitation could feel abhorrent, and it could be a “miserable” emptiness.

Between “La Casa all’Italiana” and the V Triennale, a world of feeling over these original concepts would furnish Domus. Some authors continued fleshing out the repercussions of Ponti’s original ideals. Others initiated their own micro-manifestos on emotion in Italian architecture and design. Tracing the evolution of ideas and emotions during this period is crucial for understanding how Domus architects, designers, and authors felt in Fascist Italy. The following segments of this essay focus on major themes in feelings over architecture and design in Domus: simplicity, nature, comfort, happiness, heritage, imitation, and identity. Each of these strains are tangled in a web of associations and connections, which interact and gradually coalesce into coherent meanings and emotions. I’ll trace the evolution of these meanings and feelings until the V Triennale in 1933, and then briefly explain the exhibition using them as interpretative keys. By then, we’ll have more clarity on the question: why would rationalism make Italians happy?

Past or Future, Simple or Complex?

Luigi Piccinato’s article on an Italian country house proclaimed “[w]e are in age of fakes.” Italians had “forgotten the true meanings of words,” he thought. The homes he featured didn’t “want to be anything other than houses: real houses that reflect our totally modern way of life and our way of feeling as men of the 20th century.” Piccinato continued, echoing an argument Frank Lloyd Wright made, “we paint the walls with wood; we varnish the wood with marble; we delude ourselves that country houses are villas and that rented houses are palaces.” Piccinato finished, the house in his article was comfortable, easy, and sweet in its “decorative simplicity.” Later in 1929, another article in Domus praised interiors with simple ornament. The article wrote on the home’s “health” in its elementary, clear, and “sincere” architecture– a “rare thing that consoles us… [and] makes us peaceful and happy.” By the year’s end, Ponti declared a “supreme virtue of art” was reaching the “maximum of efficacy or emotion with the minimum of those expressive attitudes.” If this principle was taken to its logical conclusion and expression was reduced to nil, Ponti imagined all that would persist would be pure art and “pure emotion.” Robert Papini took up Ponti’s elimination analogy, explaining that the “file of criticism… reduces ideas to lines, so that thought looks like a design governed by the need for its own logical and evident internal structure,” like the great masters Dante and Brunelleschi, who in their “dry” expression could enclose “the whole universe with a single line.” Clearly, neither Ponti nor Papini thought simplification was equitable to reduced emotion. 

Domus authors’ ideals of simplicity were often associated with notions of imitation and innovation. In the above mentioned articles, simplification was usually juxtaposed against traditional Italian styles and imitation. Ponti warned against the “danger of disguises,” and Papini thought that the “certain simple truths” discovered by Tuscan masters were eventually “lost in the triviality of the tacky.” Papini urged architects to “accept simplicity and clarity as the norms of their living in art,” to “detest the useless, the plethoric, the superfluous,” and to live “in one’s own time.” Another article called desiring antique and traditional forms a “vice” that “reduces us… to a deplorable inertia, to an absurd lack of needs” that slows adopting technical sophistication in the home. Michele Marelli imagined abandoning “superimposed and artificial” traditional imitations once and for all, and implored readers to reclaim “control” and embrace the “sincere characteristics” of elementary forms. Emilio Lancia even claimed foreigners understood Italy’s architectural and design heritage better than many “cultured” Italians since their observations were “uncontaminated by habit.” Foreign observers could detect the essential connection between traditional masterpieces and contemporary works in their aligned focus on satisfying the “needs of daily life.” Among these authors, imitation was a petrified habit and “vice” that depreciated Italians’ authentic lives. Moreover, imitating tradition was consistently likened to a psychological dependence or harmful social norm.

Robert Papini most pathologized imitation of traditional styles. Papini considered its prevalence as a “force of inertia” detached from contemporary life. He likened imitating tradition to an aging English maid jealous in her fading youth, incapable of fresh thought. Papini’s rhetoric was consistently metaphorical, and typically involved diagnosing imitators. He equated imitating to brainwashing, withered soils, and disease that required a fundamental shift in values, habits, tastes, and production to cure. Papini’s themes were continued in other Domus articles. One author claimed disliking traditional imitation was “healthy.” Condemnation, the author argued, should be expressed “with joy.” Other authors appropriated Papini’s out of touch metaphor, but placed a patriotic spin on it, arguing that “loving art of one’s time is a sign of faith in ourselves” and doing otherwise symbolized disrespect for the Italian nation and people. Papini took up this point in Domus’ last issue of 1929, claiming a “self-respecting” architect is a contributor to “daily happiness” and “comfort.” On the other hand, imitation of tradition was like inauthentic theater, enjoyed only by “decrepit mind[s].” These authors felt innovation and fresh styles expressed vitality, happiness and self-respect; traditional imitation was for the aging and those stuck in a false consciousness detached from contemporary life. Clearly, many felt similarly about the symbolic meanings of these forms.

As we’ve seen, imitating tradition and rationalism were juxtaposed in many Domus authors’ texts. In Domus’ final article of 1929, Gio Ponti imagined a natural reason for Italy rejecting traditional imitations and embracing rational simplification. Architecture’s future was to become increasingly economized, Ponti proclaimed. As economic considerations increasingly dictated the form of architecture and design, decoration would naturally become more standardized and stripped of superfluous and expensive adornments. “Decoration in conflict with the economy of construction” would be eliminated, he argued. This economic fact would achieve more “sincere” designs of beautiful geometric “lines and volumes… purged of decorative lies.” Therefore, the natural orientation of the economic imperative would valorize particular material forms and entice artists to “search for a purity of sign, in a new harmony,” in a “non-fallacious” or “sincere” relationship between authentic feeling and material form. In other words, Ponti imagined a natural teleology of progression toward architectural and design simplification. Ponti had rationalized the dichotomy prevalent in Domus from the beginning. On the one hand, simplification was natural and “sincere” since it matched contemporary life, in particular, economic conditions. On the other hand, imitation of tradition was unnatural “lies” contrary to the unavoidable torrent of contemporary Italian life.

One Foot on the Ground, Comfortably

The feeling of comfort paralleled notions of imitation and simplicity for authors in Domus. Many saw comfort deriving from matching material forms with contemporary Italians’ needs. Mario Fontana’s series on furnishing small apartments most revealed this relationship. Fontana thought armchairs and sofas should “serve their purpose and not just show off.” He thought armchairs should emulate car interior seating, where “cushions correspond perfectly to the purpose of sitting with maximum comfort.” In Fontana’s example, the most up-to-date technology was positioned as best suited to comfort. In the next issue of Domus, Fontana argued the bedroom should be quiet, dark, and restful to relax Italians’ nerves after being “tense and abused by the noisy and hectic life of the city.” He followed Ponti in believing peace, comfort, and health would come from sunlight, air, but also soft colors. Fontana envisioned comfort as a status attained through nature and matching an object’s function with Italians’ needs. Nature was romanticized as tranquil, serene, and comfortable compared to the noisy, hectic, and tense urban environment. Fontana even penned a section on color psychology that exalted common colors in nature as sources of rest, intimacy, and comfort.

Fontana wasn’t the only author to represent the home as a restful sanctuary. Filippo Bolaffi Kalifa drew on the idiom “one foot on the ground” to explain a comfortable and restful life and home. For Kalifa, “one foot on the ground” meant a countryside home far from the city. Terra in her idiom also implied that living on earth meant being amongst nature, whereas urban environments were nature’s antithesis. She continued, to achieve true “intimate comfort,” the house needed comfortable furniture with straight lines, smooth surfaces, and simple shapes; deep and comfortable armchairs; a low, comfortable, and pleasant smoking or tea table; a comfortable daybed for naps; and a bathroom of “maximum comfort” to refresh “tired muscles, to freshen up and to put oneself in order.” Clearly, Kalifa thought comfort was paramount for a “happy, rested and ready” life. Another author extended Kalifa’s insinuation that a comfortable home remedied health, claiming it was the antidote to the “whirlwind” of life that left Italians restless, fatigued, fevered, and struggling for energy. The author urged readers to position rest and recreation as the home’s “mission,” which would lead Italians “back to ourselves.” By now, it’s apparent these Domus authors shared similar feelings of comfort. Each thought comfort meant rest, recovery, and intimacy that was associated with nature and the contrapositive “whirlwind” of contemporary life. Kindling comfort mirrored those same elements of sunlight and air that Ponti outlined in “La Casa all’Italiana“, but each author expressed their feelings in their own way. Still, the parallels suggest one thread of shared feeling in Domus, as an emotional community.

Despite occasionally juxtaposing nature against the city, Domus authors didn’t view nature as antithetical to rationalistic architecture and design. Carlo Enrico Rava denounced rationalism detached from nature as an “absolute leveling” that suffocated individualism. Rava claimed Italy had to embrace a “healthy” form of rationalism, which accepted simplification and geometric designs but affirmed Italians’ unique “Latin climate” of race, culture, and dispositions. Rava’s climate metaphor represented Italians’ intimate essence, their “eternal Latin spirits.” This primordial spirit was expressed in their artistic forms: rational, made of white surfaces, smooth cubes, and terraces. Rava even extended “La Casa all’Italiana” by insisting the acclaimed Mediterranean climate and sun were essential elements of Italians’ heritage and identity. In other words, Rava’s climate double entendre positioned Italians’ actual environmental climate as a lynchpin in their being. If we connect Rava’s thesis to other Domus authors’ ideals, we can understand why Italians’ natural environment was so fundamental for comfort. In “La Casa all’Italiana“, Ponti argued Italians’ needs were “superior” than Corbusier’s “machine for living in.” That’s because “La Casa all’Italiana” included Rava’s ethic a priori in Italians’ needs. Thus, the Mediterranean natural environment itself had a “function” that satisfied Italians’ deepest essence, their unique being-in-the-world as Italians.

Odyssey of the Latin Spirit

So far we’ve examined several trends of feeling that Domus authors expressed leading up to the V Triennale in 1933. “La Casa all’Italiana” may have inaugurated strands of feeling on architecture and design, but Ponti’s original themes of nature, simplicity, comfort, and imitation were appropriated, changed, and extended over time. Nevertheless, these feelings maintained astounding likeness through time and across authors. First, simplicity was deemed “sincere” and in conformance with contemporary life. Adherence to contemporary life was felt to be happy, peaceful, consoling, healthy, natural, and in control. Second, imitation of traditional Italian styles was seen as antithetical to simplicity. For many Domus authors, imitating historical styles indicated a detachment from contemporary life, a sort of false consciousness that was unnatural, vulgar, abhorrent, aged, withered, pestilent, decrepit, and lacked respect for oneself and Italian society. Third, comfort and happiness derived from matching material forms with Italians’ needs. Simple and basic shapes and straight lines were discerned as best suited to Italians’ use, but sunlight, air, and the environment were recognized for their “function” in Italians’ unique needs of heritage and identity.

By now, we can see the edifice for how Italians might have felt from Fascist rationalist architecture and design. Domus authors felt for particular forms, but also aimed to modify and create forms to spark those feelings. While propagating rationalistic forms in Domus, authors informed us how they felt about them. As authors digested, approved, and disapproved of their peers’ emotional assessments, the forms too were stamped with new ideals and emotional associations. This circulatory process of communication and engagement allowed Domus authors to erect a “system of feeling.” Here, particular feelings were digested, ignored, valued, devalued, expected, encouraged, tolerated, and deplored as Domus authors gradually contested, altered, and fashioned their shared patterns of feeling as an emotional community. Moreover, these forms carried historical baggage: Italy’s ambivalent relationship between past and contemporary architecture and design. As we’ve seen, Domus authors consistently contextualized their program through notions of Italy’s past and present. In the two years leading up to the V Triennale, these ideals, themes, and feelings continued their formation and propagation in Domus. However, many new micro-manifestos shaped Domus authors’ evolution of feeling on architecture and design. The following section reviews the major ones, and culminates in their representation at the V Triennale.

Latin Spirit: Carlo Rava continued sketching out the “Latin” spirit through several Domus issues. In February of 1931, Rava urged readers to take the “most intimate racial essence” of the “Latin” and “Mediterranean” spirit and plant it in rationalistic architecture and design. Rava followed Ponti in diagnosing rationalism’s unavoidable future in Italy, citing economic necessity. But Rava maintained that race, personality, and nationality were essential in this future. He pointed his finger at “blind” followers of “pure” rationalism who were dazzled by rigid and abstract codes. Their stale personalities were decipherable from their architecture, which was sterile, uninventive, “bare and poor, gloomy and desolate.” At best, their work expressed “dignified misery.” Against “pure” rationalists’ dull characters and architecture stood the “free imagination” of the “all-Latin rhythm,” expressed in open and sunny terraces with dreams of the sea, the clear and serene façades, candid pergolas, and Italian artists’ courageous and fluid love for invention. This dichotomy of the “free” Latin spirit versus dull rationalist purists culminated in November, when Rava “declared once and for all”– “rationalism” is just a word, “a definition that is neither happy nor exact… [which] must no longer limit the horizon, nor close the future.” Rationalism as a program had brought its benefits, but had to stop encumbering Italians’ “free personalit[ies]” and “sincere and independent expression[s].” Rava’s ideal-typical Latin spirit valorized “sincere” and authentic expression in Italian architecture and design, and devalued rigid artistic styles and codes. Rava also founded these valuations on a cement substructure of emotion. Pure rationalism was ‘miserable’ and lacked authentic and free expression; but in balance with Italian subjective feelings, simplification could be courageous, sincere, and therefore happy.

Figure 3. Adalberto Libera and Mario Ridolfi, social housing in Rome. Rava wrote the “[c]lassicism of rhythms” disturbed the “rational arrangement of the external stairs[,]” and yet he found Libera and Ridolfi’s sketch an “interesting movement back to Italian inspiration.” In “Spirito Latino II,” Carlo Enrico Rava, Domus 38, February 1931.

Figure 4. Adalberto Libera’s Villa for Savona, Rava thought the house “reveals even more heartfelt and lively characteristics of [the] ‘Mediterranean spirit[.]’” Ibid.

Economic Imperative: Ponti continued defining the “economic imperative” affecting Italian architecture and design. Ponti advised artists to respond to the Great Depression with “multiplied creative and technical capacity.” He even forecasted that increasing technical, artistic, and economic sophistication was “inescapable.” Therefore, Italians had to escape “lazy” artistic and technical production, and embrace “today’s taste and technique.” Suddenly, in the next issue of Domus in January 1932, Ponti repudiated his insistence on economic considerations. Within a month of stressing economics’ predominance in artistic and technical production, Ponti concluded the era of strictly “satisfy[ing] the market” was over. Instead, architects and designers had to “satisfy the highest needs of the human.” Ponti had seemingly returned to La Casa all’Italiana’s emphasis on Italians’ unique inner needs. He continued, achieving a “higher, more sincere form for our life” meant loving “pure and authentic” material forms. Ponti affirmed his return to his emotional roots, arguing for sun, light, and air in the home. Yet, ironically, Ponti also urged for more space in homes, a consequence of continual reductions from pure economic considerations. Ponti’s oscillations on economic concerns moved with housing prices in the Great Depression, but his latest pivot coincidentally landed him back to his roots (next to Rava). Architecture and design could accept simplification, so long as Italians’ natural needs of sun, light, and air were met. 

Being Authentic Italians: Authenticity and living for today was a major theme in Domus. Indeed, without referencing Domus authors’ appeals to authenticity and cravings for new forms, it would be difficult to pinpoint why detailed ornamentation and imitation of historical styles were so undesirable and abhorrent. However, in 1932 even Italian tradition was reassessed as living for today. In March, Ponti clarified that shunning traditional imitation wasn’t rejecting authentic tradition, per se. Italian tradition was more than a form, he said. Italian tradition encapsulated the “glory” of previous artistic masters, their “aim of spirits,” and the Italian race’s lineage of producing characteristic and authentic forms. In other words, Ponti reduced traditional forms to their immaterial essence: pure authentic expression. Therefore, contemporary Italian artists and classic masters were directly comparable in their common authentic expressions. A few pages later, Giovanni Michelucci did just that. Michelucci compared contemporary rationalistic buildings and 14th and 15th century paintings of architecture, revealing their “affinity of spirit.” Despite his rhetoric, Michelucci’s image selection showed apparent parallels of form, not just authentic expressions. Michelucci saw a shared “conceptual and linear purification” here, perhaps, meaning that form and feeling were coincidently ‘purified.’ Nevertheless, after this issue, 14th and 15th century paintings would be regular segments in Domus. 

Figure 5. Painted in the church of Santa Croce in Florence by Giottino, 14th century. In “Contatti fra Architetture Antiche e Moderne,” Giovanni Michelucci, Domus 51, March 1932.

Figure 6. Mario Ridolfi’s Marine Colony project at Castel Fusano in Rome. Ibid.

Michelucci’s illustrations showed a preference toward selective traditional forms: rectilinear and lacking traditional ornament. It’s no wonder why many Domus articles suddenly stressed the importance of severe selection in choosing forms, regardless of their temporal origin. Ponti wrote, “[f]aced with the increasingly widespread and uncontrollable adoption of the formulas… another attitude imposes itself: qualitative judgment, selection.” Ponti even advised readers in selecting forms of Italy’s “highest tenor”– clarity of concept and chastity of principle. Later, he recommended “frank” forms of simple ornamental “modesty” for their direct “moral” connection to ancient architecture. Ponti posed selection as an interpretation into contemporary artists’ intentions. But again, it was apparent which forms were “frank,” since he simultaneously touted the sincerity of “elemental simplicity.” Like other ideals in Domus, selection was painted in notions of Italian authenticity. Proper selection meant choosing “loving and passionate interpretation[s] of today’s life.” Nevertheless, detecting true authenticity was never more than surface level judgements on historical imitation and simplified forms, despite authors’ persistent and vague allusions to “intentions,” “aim of spirits,” and Italian heritage. The formula remained clear. On the one hand, wholesale imitation of tradition was inauthentic. On the other hand, invention and acceptance of some basic elements of tradition was authentic.

Even through such nuanced developments and micro-manifestos, Domus authors remained adamant about the “happiness” and “comfort” rooted in authentic, rationalistic, and sleek expressions of architecture and design right up to the V Triennale. Carlo Felice celebrated the comfort and happiness of the “purity of line.” Perhaps Italians’ love for rectilinear forms came from their innate “desire for order, measure, [and] clarity,” he wondered. Assessing a new construction, one article regretted that an imitative cornice revealed the architectural expression was neither sincere nor happy. Another author extolled the happiness arising from a Mediterranean villa that incorporated nature.

These authors in Domus clearly shared common aspects of feelings over particular architecture and design forms. Of course, these feelings weren’t exactly the same nor static. But the persistent and common expressions of emotion by numerous authors over several years, indicates that Domus constituted an emotional community where architects, designers, engineers, and artists shared, contested, and fashioned their feelings on architecture and design. Even where their ideals on their face appeared different– Gio Ponti’s “La Casa all’Italiana” and Carlo Rava’s “Latin” spirit– their content in Domus’ system of feeling typically meant their resulting conclusions were astoundingly similar. Rava’s Latin spirit involved Italians’ inner essence, tradition, and heritage; “La Casa all’Italiana” retorted Corbusier’s purely functional “machine for living in.” But since both authors shared common impressions on Italians’ inner needs, their results were the same: embrace design elements that incorporate nature. Without their common glue of a primordial Italian ethos, their emotions wouldn’t have aligned. The similarities in Domus authors’ feelings were extraordinarily stable from “La Casa all’Italiana” to the V Triennale, even when their system of associations, concepts, and rationales became increasingly complex. For example, “happiness” from architecture and design involved associations of authenticity and an intrinsic Latin spirit, which were connected to heritage, traditional imitations, simplicity, nature, economic considerations, and the less defined relationships of each.

Returning to those seemingly hackneyed and ideological proclamations in the V Triennale exhibition catalog, understanding why geometric squares, triangles, and diligent straight avenues were poised to “animate” Italians is more intelligible. First, Italian architects and designers were clearly concerned about being authentic and true to their contemporary environment. The verb animare, meaning “to enliven” or to breathe life into, itself corresponds to Domus’ author’s stress on living for today. This was a continued concern in the Triennale catalog. Filippo Marinetti commended the “brilliant solutions” of forms and processes for Italians’ needs of comfort and hygiene, a problem that plagued Italians’ daily lives, he thought. Moreover, the quote on architecture and design “forming the environment in which we live and work” attests to artists’ concerns for living for today. Italian artists were urged to create forms that demonstrated the “testimony of our age” in their unique cultural and racial characteristics, just as Rava had stressed. Italians demanded “true and proper” interpretations of their social and individual lives, the catalog continued. So, much like in Domus, artists were to create “frank” representations of life through architecture and design, which meant recognizing economic realities and imprinting Italians’ unique character on them without compromising to abstractions and impersonal theories. Or, as the catalog stated, forms had to match the “uses of our time,” the “needs of today’s social life,” and market demands. 

Second, the V Triennale catalog contrasted authentic forms of living for today against imitations of historical styles. Traditional copies were outright taunted for their “ephemeral and useless extravagance.” The exhibition even banned “copies and counterfeits of the antique” and forms unsuited for “modern use.” Indeed, the V Triennale aimed to be the “mirror” of contemporary Italian civilization. Of course, these were all concerns rampant in Domus: appeals to Italians’ unique needs and contemporary circumstances, concerns over simplification and copying tradition, economic imperatives, and appeals to authentic expression and living for today. 

Third, simplification and rationalism were positioned as the logical forms for Italians’ contemporary needs and being. The catalog’s chapter on architecture featured Leon Alberti’s maxim, “[an] object is beautiful when it’s impossible to remove or add one element to it without compromising its value and form.” Simplification and traditional imitation were antithetical at the V Triennale, just as Domus authors supposed. Imitation and the “shackles of tradition” lacked “vitality” and weren’t “faithful mirror[s] of life in its own time,” according to the catalog. Rationalism restored buildings’ “true value” by matching their forms and functions. Rational simplification was deemed an authentic application of materials, not “disguised or fake” but in constructive “sincerity.” Where rationalism was authentic and living for today, copying tradition was lifeless, constricting, and insincere.

Figure 7.  Enrico Griffini, Eugenio Faludi, and Piero Botton’s Casa di Vacanza sul Lago that Ponti found “sober,” in “Case per Vacanza,” Gio Ponti, Domus 66, June 1933.

The V Triennale’s architecture and design forms also mirrored those in Domus. Most homes exhibited were rectilinear and absent of traditional ornament. Ponti featured one in Domus, writing on its “sober” form and essential integration of sunlight. Maria Parpagliolo featured another, praising its “happiness” in uniting architecture and nature. A “Minimum House” was considered a “real house in which to live” in Domus, and comfortable and inexpensive in the exhibition catalog. The catalog designated a “Country House for a Man of

Figure 8. C. Scoccimarro, P. Zanini, and Ermes Midena’s House of the Aviator, which Parpagliolo considered happy. In “I Giardini e la Floricoltura alla Triennale,” Maria Parpagliolo, Domus 67, July 1933.

Study” restful, tranquil, simple, and serene. In Domus, the house was acclaimed for matching occupants’ “intimate and spiritual” needs with the form’s functions. Together with its integration of sunlight, space, and water, the article concluded the home offered an “invitation to life (as it is today).” Again, all homes presented were primarily rectilinear and absent of traditional ornament. Each presented a motif of feeling common in Domus: happiness in harmonizing nature and architecture, living for today and not the past, and comfort and rest in simplified forms out of economic necessities.

Figure 9. Luigi Moretti, Mario Paniconi, Giulio Pediconi, Mose Tuffargli Luciano’s Country House for a Man of Study, restful, serene, simple, and an “invitation to life (as it is today).” In “Tendenze in Architettura,” Domus 70, October 1933.

So, to return to where we started: why did architects and critics in Fascist Italy presume that rationalism in architecture and design would make people happy? According to authors in Domus, achieving happiness and comfort through architecture and design meant expressing “sincere” and authentic feelings, which were “contemporary” and not imitations of previous Italians’ feelings. For some, this meant embracing the “true” state of Italians’ environments: economic necessities and nature. But more importantly it meant attuning forms to Italians’ dynamic needs, free imaginations, and authentic feelings unrestrained by rigid stylistic codes. Italians’ genuine subjectivities were so cherished that tradition itself was eventually deemed acceptable. Nevertheless, rationalism endured as the predominant form for its economic advantages, and supposed antithetical relationship to traditional ornamentation. This is why Domus authors enjoyed simplified and rectilinear forms. Rationalism was assessed as living for today and authentic, and therefore, evoked happiness and comfort to authors in Domus as an emotional community.

After the V Triennale, Ponti reflected on emotion in architecture and design. He explained that forms “emanate” impressions of art’s “identity”– that decisive relationship between “expression and content.” Ponti wondered, “what is the house like for us today?” and “how are we today for the house?” Despite Italian architecture and design’s enormous changes during Domus’ lifetime, Ponti thought there was nothing “physically” new under the sun– not the pergolas, terraces, nor the large windows facing the sea– but what had changed was the individual and their deepest “desires” and “passions.” Perhaps, Ponti was only employing passions as fashionable catchwords in Fascism, but his insinuation that Italians’ passions were embedded in their attitudes and that both changed, indicates Ponti himself discerned emotions as individual, social, and mutable elements that shaped Italians’ perspectives of the world. In recognizing this in his calculus over forms, Ponti was living beyond his day. 

Conclusion: At the V Triennale di Milano in Italy in 1933, rationalistic forms were poised to “animate” observers’ nerves. For authors in the magazine Domus, rationalism was considered happy and comfortable. First, Domus authors constituted an emotional community with shared interests, associations, and feelings on architecture and design. Second, even though Gio Ponti’s “La Casa all’Italiana” may have inaugurated strands of feeling on architecture and design, his original themes of nature, simplicity, comfort, and imitation were appropriated, changed, and extended over time in Domus. Nevertheless, these feelings maintained astounding likeness through time and across authors. Third, even when authors’ ideals appeared different, their relationship in Domus’ system of feeling typically meant their conclusions concurred. This system of feeling represented an intricate network of associations, beliefs, and feelings on simplicity, nature, comfort, happiness, heritage, imitation, and identity. Fourth, in Domus authors’ system of feeling, rationalism was positioned as living for today and authentic, and antithetical to historical imitation. Moreover, authors consistently claimed that authentic forms felt happy and comfortable, while historical imitations felt abhorrent and miserable. Finally, since rationalism was assessed as living for today and authentic, rectilinear and simplified forms absent of traditional ornament were deemed to evoke happiness and comfort for authors in Domus as an emotional community.

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