LA CASA ELETTRICA DI FIGINI E POLLINI
Giacomo Polin
Rome: Officina Edizioni, November 1982. First edition. Text in Italian. Slim quarto. Perfect bound uncoated photo illustrated wrappers. 153 pp. 103 black and white illustrations. Includes 12-page facsimile of 1930 promotional booklet bound in. Wrappers lightly toned, but a nearly fine copy. Scarce.
5.5 x 8.25-inch softcover book with 153 pages and 103 black and white illustrations. Published as part of the “Architettura / Opere” series edited by Giorgio Ciucci, this volume covers all aspects of Luigi Figini and Gino Pollini’s design and construction of the Gruppo 7 ‘Electric House’ for the IV International Triennial Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Monza in 1930.
“The Electric House” was exhibited in 1930 for the IV International Triennial Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Monza. Today the electric house no longer exists—it was demolished a few months after its inauguration. The project was credited to Gruppo 7, with Figini and Pollini as the architects for the villa/pavilion with contributions from Bottoni, Frette and Libera for the interior designs. The Casa Elettrica represented one of the most advanced explorations in modern home design in Italy during the fascist period. Using large planar surfaces, pillars, industrial materials, reinforced concrete and linoleum, the architects design a modernist home as an example of what the Italian house should have become. The project was financed by Edison and other companies.
The Electric House was conceived both as a home and as an exhibition space for industrial design and decorative arts. From the planimetric layout it is possible to appreciate the extreme simplicity of the project and its affinity with the principles of Le Corbusier's five points of architecture, such as the free plan, the structure in reinforced concrete pillars, the ribbon window and the continuity between internal spaces and external.
The layout is very simple: a single-story building with a rectangular plan (16 meters by 8) with access staircase to the upper floor entirely occupied by a panoramic terrace, partly covered on the rear view above the staircase. On the front there is a covered entrance hall and immediately next to it the L-shaped fold of the large glass wall of the greenhouse; on the back the openings of one of the two bedrooms, the dining room and the kitchen, the latter also with a service exit. The walls of the house disappear, transform, open from floor to ceiling onto the surrounding landscape, the windows are transformed into horizontal, changing or moving luminous paintings.
The Electric House is identified for Figini and Pollini in the immense double glass wall of the greenhouse which houses, in a strip of sand and stones ten meters long and one meter wide, a large number of succulent plants. Filter and mirror, as in an aquarium effect, the greenhouse distorts its content as a metaphor for the synthesis of external-internal, as an organism that has in the void an element of communication and exchange with the pre-existing surroundings, with nature. According to the criterion of "maximum exploitation of the space that the modern building economy imposes", the designers gave rise to an arrangement of the internal spaces in the Electric House which was mimetic with respect to the composition of the architecture in the landscape, an artificial landscape within the natural landscape . This mimicry was also of an exhibition type, since in the various functional spaces of the Electric House there were a notable number of technical applications to the problem of electricity, a vast collection of lamps, machines and household appliances.
All the electrical appliances and furniture embodied the "modern" ambitions of the building organization on a small scale: the Electric House had to be an example, while going well beyond the concrete possibilities of the mass of users to whom the project was aimed. In addition to the greenhouse, to which a certain number of construction features gave an object value that was difficult to reproduce, other interior details were based on the application of relatively precious and avant-garde finishes: the built-in wardrobes, the door coverings in enamelled Eternit sheets in nitrocellulose, often profiled by chromed corners, the linoleum floors, the walls lined with rubberized material, the balustrade of the staircase and the internal loggia in chromed metal, the celluloid furniture closures, gave the house an interpretation that was both exclusive and open , favoring the progressive diffusion of modern materials.