This (above) is a model of a house designed by the Italian architect Cesare Cattaneo. (The furniture was designed by Carlo Mollino. If you don't know who he was, check him out, please). It's located in Cernobbio, Italy. Today it is known as Casa Cattaneo, but it was designed, and built, as a rental property between the years 1938 and 1939, (maybe for people on their way to invisibility, as James Altucher might say).
However, it still exists, and it reminds us that a beautiful object of design, even if it's meant to be experienced in a transitory way (like a rental, an automobile, an item of clothing) represents the product of the interaction between human creativity and reality. Therefore when uniquely gifted individuals, like Cattaneo, create something, the result is unique and ever-lasting, and it enriches creation. Someone might even say that human creativity represents part of a divine plan. Cesare Cattaneo certainly thought so, and he had his ideas, also, about what a house should represent for a man, as Ebe Gianotti explains in the following article, that I have translated into English.
(The article was published in Italian on La Bussola Quotidiana. All the models that appear in the pictures are by Onirofabrik).
Cesare Cattaneo and the Ideal House.
Even for architecture, the years of the 1900’s were the
century of experimentation, the years of a clean severance with tradition and
the past, and the architects who flowed to Rationalism, the most important
architectural movement of the first half of the century in Italy and in Europe,
were inspired by the certainty that architecture in the new century had a
messianic role to play.
In their work and in
their plans, their conviction to be able to change the people and the world by
the strength of the principles on which the new architecture was being founded is obvious. However, the tension that prompted them was ethical, social, ideological, but almost
never religious or spiritual; except in some rare case, such as the example of
Cesare Cattaneo (1912-1943).
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| Cesare Cattaneo |
In anticipation of the celebrations of the
hundredth anniversary of his birth, Archivio Cattaneo published a book in two
volumes: Scritti di architettura (Writings on Architecture Archivio
Cattaneo Publisher), that contains many interesting documents, including a 1942
article, which was summed up in previous notes entitled Manifest for a
Catholic Architecture.
The article was written for the
architecture magazine Domus and, even today, it seems to point to a
method that is very different from the path followed by some contemporary
architects. Rather than offering themselves as interpreters of human needs, or
problem-solvers at the service of Man, these demiurges, having cut the
umbilical cord which connects architecture to its history, see themselves as
makers of their own fate with a programmatic prosopopoeia all of their own,
which is closer to an ideology than a craft.
The title of Cattaneo’s article is very significant: La
casa e l’ideale (The House and the Ideal). It took some guts to propose it
to one of the foremost avant-garde architecture magazines! Could there have
been a more glaring mismatch than that? We must remember that this was the
historical period in which the home of the working and lower middle classes was
the object of an analytical and almost fanatical study to determine, with
ergometric precision, exactly the minimum space required for each room of the
dwelling in relation to the number of occupants and their movements, while they
engaged in their various activities.
Stated that way, the concept doesn’t even
seem wrong. But it is erroneous because of the peculiarity of the thought that
generated it, that is, the scientific-engineering approach which classifies people’s needs as they relate to dwelling as if they were exclusively of a
functional and physiological nature – a thought that, even today, is still held
in high regard.
Cesare Cattaneo understood this limitation
clearly and, in his article, he proposed as an alternative a project called
Family House for the Christian Family; premising his report with a quote from
one of the Wednesday’s Audiences of Pope Pius XII: “The family is the
beginning of society. As the human body, the family is composed by living cells
which are not just placed one near the other, but with their intimate and
constant relation they constitute an organic whole. In the same way a society
is not formed just by a conglomeration of individual sporadic beings who appear
just for an instant only to disappear; rather it is formed by the economic association
and the moral solidarity of the families which, transmitting from one
generation to the next the precious heritage of the same ideal, the same
civilization, the same religious belief, assure the cohesion and continuity of
social ties.”
Cattaneo was a refined intellectual, one
of the most brilliant in the fight for a new architecture, and was neither a
traditionalist nor at the margins of the debate; therefore, the fact that he
asked himself the crucial question which everybody else avoided, that is, what
should a house represent for a man - and from that he started to design it – amounted to nothing else but taking a revolutionary position.
Even today, his analysis of the concept,
which at the time was just embryonic and now is widespread, is lucid and
correct: the view of the home as a haven for the freedom of the people who
live in it, as the place where one can set free his instincts and his whims,
and where the dwellers are just “incapable to give their intimate lives a
meaning which was not individualistic and romantic.”
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A model of the Christian house, as envisioned by Cattaneo
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In the process of designing on the basis of the
codes and the modern rules of distribution (“the pedantic rules of orientation,
lighting of the rooms, height of the ceilings, cubic meters of air per
dweller...”), what Cattaneo felt was the lack of a fundamental principle
capable of orienting his work (“[A]nd
why should the kitchen be near the dining room?
Why eat in the dining room at all? Wouldn’t each dweller maybe eat more
comfortably in his or her bedroom?”). That is, he felt an absence of a principle that
took into account the impossibility of reducing man to a simple vegetative
biological entity, as if he were “a single isolated animal or just simply close
to other people, disregarding the effort he makes to fuse himself with other men
in an organism which is superior to his own individuality.” He thought that if we “Exclude[] synthesis
from man, how can we even think about synthesis in architecture?”
The ordering
principle, for him, could only be found in the Christian concept of the family and, holding
fast to that idea, he set out to develop a model, with several variants, to find
an answer to the natural need for a home that arises with the establishment of
a new family.
Cattaneo’s description of the founding act of the new home - which is the delimitation of the land with a fence wall and the laying at the entrance of a stone with the name of the family carved on it - has the character of a sacred act. Also sacred in character is the construction of the family room in a central position with respect to the land. That room is dedicated to the safe-keeping of especially valuable objects that are linked to the memories of the ancestors and the marriage. It is the chosen place for prayer and to receive relatives, and is the room around which all the other rooms of the house develop. Today we would call it a “work-in-progress” house.
In fact, Cattaneo’s house is not rigidly defined from the beginning of its construction and set-up. Cattaneo forecast that, in time, the bedrooms will develop starting from the main nucleus, as more children will be born, mimicking a process similar to the growth of an organism; because Cattaneo thought that an architecture should be considered an organism. What will happen when the children will have grown? The house will empty, little by little, until the marriage of a grandchild who will acquire it. If the taste and the fashion will have changed he or she could demolish it, though preserving the fence wall, the threshold name stone and the family room.
Cattaneo’s intuition was extraordinary: he recognized the ancestral need to put down roots in a place and then transfer it to the new generations; and the need to work to give an architectural shape to this ancestral need, which is tied to memory and to the construction of one’s identity – and that has nothing to do with any functional blueprint – adapting the architecture to the modern needs that force us to change within closer and closer frames of time. This change severs one’s roots to one’s place of origin, while it “would only be natural and appropriate that in a rapidly moving life a man also held a firm reference point.”
However, Cattaneo’s building techniques were subordinated to the hierarchy of the different parts of the organism: particularly precise rules of execution were set and solid long lasting materials were chosen for the family room; while in the temporary sections of the house the structures were light and flexible.
These days, the flexible parts of the house would be particularly suitable to be built employing the many alternative materials offered today for temporary and eco-sustainable housing (for example the m² 100/€ 100.000 house exhibited at the 2010 Triennale). Also, this way, the issue of ecology would be brought back to its proper dimension of a means, and not an end; losing the character of unassailable dogma that it has acquired.
Cattaneo didn’t hide from the problem that such a house could only be built for a small number of people; although, thinking about the suburban neighborhoods in our country, with single family homes as far as the eye can see, maybe we’re not really talking about a minority. His answer to the raising of that issue was the following: “The problem of the mid and low income housing will be truly framed when we will have settled the question of the higher classes’ house, which should serve as an example for the former. Leon Battista Alberti: “Be the house of the poor similar to the house of the rich, but not the reverse.”
If the low-income house today is so ugly and inadequate to give true happiness to its occupants, it’s mainly because the rich have lost the sense of the good and beautiful dwelling and of the right family life.”
Ebe Gianotti is an architect and a journalist. She writes for the Italian daily newspapers L'Ordine and Il Giornale.
I hope you enjoyed her article and your comments, as always, will be greatly appreciated.
Thank you.
L. Pavese
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