HOME WEIRD HOME
HOME WEIRD HOME
Extravagant architectural and urban planning episodes
APRIL 2024 - GAZE
"The home should be the treasure chest of living."
Le Corbusier
One of the things I like to do the most is photographing houses: colorful facades, sloping roofs, lovely balconies, Art Nouveau floral decorations, statues, windows that reflect the sunlight.
I always walk with my nose up in search of urban inspirations worthy of being immortalized: yellow Milanese buildings, pink houses with a French taste in Turin, Victorian villas with colored doors in London and micro gardens, floral azulejos in Lisbon, iconic striped patterns and bottle green shutters in the Genoese alleys. To explore cities on foot is to discover the wonder of the play of light; I love to photograph in the summer when people empty the cities, in what is called the Golden Hour, when the light is enveloping and soft.
At the Maggiolina, as they say in Milan, the neighborhood houses are in the shape of igloos and mushrooms, extravagant houses built in 1946, whimsical and in their own way brilliant, designed by the engineer Mario Cavallé who imported the housing model and its construction technique from the United States. The intuition of the project, unique in a horizon of intensive construction such as that of post-war reconstruction, can be interpreted as a critique of bourgeois residential architecture, never free from the search for a style. If we think about it, the Journalists’ Village of more than 70 years ago reflected the value given to information: design apartments in small complexes in line with the spending power of the new bourgeoisie. Today, a utopia. If I peek through the windows, using my imagination, I see well-dressed men with thick John Kennedy-style eyeglasses, typewriters and cigarette smoke.
My urban journey continues in Marseille, at the Cité Radieuse, on a day at the end of December that brings with it all the scent and light of the Mediterranean. The tenement buildings designed by the famous French architect Le Corbusier – built between 1947 and 1952 – were designed to be exposed to the sun both to the west and to the east, hence the name. A radiant and visionary city designed to be a small neighborhood, with shops, common rooms and a school inside, and with a cutting-edge ante-internet system in which everyone could communicate with an intercom thanks to which all the condominiums could talk to each other for free. Brutalist architecture is combined with social function and a concept of happy community. Many tenants experimented with innovations never seen before, such as the kitchen designed by Charlotte Perriand and open to the living room, sliding doors, built-in wardrobes, libraries to separate spaces. Le Corbusier had decorated homes with every detail in mind to foster a sense of community. To be envied by modern social housing concepts.
And again, in Iran, the heavy architecture typical of the regimes of most civilian buildings is lightened with murals that look like illustrations and become silent vehicles of expression, in stark contrast to the supreme beauty of traditional buildings, in an aesthetic triumph of floral and geometric details. On the island of Hormuz, in the south of the country, the Majara Residence, designed by ZAV Architects, is a complex of colorful residences, a political and social manifesto created to show a real political and economic alternative to the island’s only profitable activity: oil trafficking. Brightly toned earth domes that become a symbol of change and social redemption in a country where the authorities are trying to impose a style even on architecture.
I could go on for hours this peregrination in the cities and in the memory that blends form, function and feeling between memories and photographs kept in tin boxes.
BY Francesca Russano
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