Outlining Terragni: A riddle reworked

Abstract

Despite his controversial political background, the leading architect of the Italian Rationalist Movement, Giuseppe Terragni, has attracted the attention of a large group of architectural scholars. He has often been acknowledged as an enigmatic architect whose work oscillated between classicism and modernism. This work takes on two of the most emblematic projects by Terragni, the Mambretti Tomb and the Danteum and provides a formal generation of both projects in the form of two parametric shape grammars to inquire on the possibility of a common compositional strategy underlying both projects. A new interpretation of Terragni’s work as a non-classical/classical computational model is given in the end.