Book Description
Peter Eisenman’s eagerly awaited magnum opus--forty years in the making--documents and investigates two of Italian rationalist architect Giuseppe Terragni’s masterworks: the Casa del Fascio and the Casa Giuliani-Frigerio, both in Como, Italy. This far-reaching study--illustrated with finely delineated two-color diagrams, archival drawings from Terragni’s studio, and period photographs--employs what Eisenman calls critical and textual readings of both buildings.
Eisenman describes the articulations and openings on the facades; notations providing the basis for his analysis. In the Casa del Fascio, the four sequential design schemes each record the previous state, encoding the process of transformation. In the Casa Giuliani-Frigerio, it is instead the process of decomposition that generates the facades. Also included in the book are an essay by Terragni, on the commissioning, design, and construction of the Casa del Fascio, and a critique by Manfredo Tafuri, the renowned Italian architectural historian and theorist.
