ALBERTO SARTORIS E IL '900
CATALOGO DELLA MOSTRA
Flavia Cristiano, Daniela Porro [Curators]
Flavia Cristiano, Daniela Porro [Curators]: ALBERTO SARTORIS E IL '900. CATALOGO DELLA MOSTRA. Rome: Gangemi Editore, 1990. First edition. Text in Italian. Square quarto. Printed glossy wrappers. 350 pp. Fully illustrated in color and black and white. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print. Front wrapper with a diagonal readers crease, rear wrapper with a diagonal corner crease. Lower textblock corner gently bumped, but a very good copy.
8.5 x 9.5-inch softcover book with 350 pages fully illustrated in color and black and white, extensive biographical material, photos, drawings and documents of his long, distinguished career, published as an exhibition catalog of the retrospective held at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Rome in May 1990.
Contents:
- Luciano Marziano, Alberto Sartoris o della modernità
- Jacques Gubler, Salutation printanière
- Daniela Pastore, Alberto Sartoris e il '900
- Marina Sommella Grossi, Alberto Sartoris tra arte e architettura. Nota biografica
- Enrico M. Ferrari, "Elementi dell'architettura funzionale": la critica di un maestro
- Maurizio Boriani, Restaurare il "moderno": un problema di prospettiva
- Marina Sommella Grossi, Sartoris e Filila. Un architetto razionalista, un pittore futurista
- Alberto Abriani, Lena, aneliti e altalene in Sartoris
- Paolo Angeletti, Piccolo alfabeto sartorisiano
- Cesare De Seta, Filila, Chiattone e Sartoris
- Livio Dimitriu, Alberto Sartoris: thè Ideology of Representation
- Marcello Fabbri, La necessità della bellezza. Attualità di Alberto Sartoris
- Marcello Fagiolo, Sartoris e la matrice metafisica del Razionalismo
- Luigi Ferrario, Un secolo di cappelle-bar, officine-cattedrali e case più belle del mondo
- Jean Mare Lamunière, Ohm et nunc
- Riccardo Mariani, Sartoris razionalista europeo
- Montserrat Moli Frigola, La Espana de Alberto Sartoris
- Gaia Remiddi, L'architettura razionale e l'arte astratta
- Mario F. Roggero, Per la laurea "ad honorem" ad Alberto Sartoris
- Marcello Fagiolo, La Biblioteca e l'Enciclopedie
- Testimonianze
- Enzo Benedetto, Sartoris Futurista
- Francoise Jaunin, Alberto Sartoris prince de l'axonométrie
- Joselita Raspi Serra, Incontro con Alberto Sartoris a Cossonay (7 gennaio 1990)
- Mag Reverdin, Lettera ad Alberto
- Catalogo
- Sez. 1: Daniela Pastore (a cura di) Sartoris architetto
- Sez. 2: Enrico M. Ferrari e Daniela Pastore (a cura di) Elementi dell'architettura funzionale
- Sez. 3: Marina Sommella Grossi e Daniela Porro (a cura di) Alberto Sartoris autore e critico.
Born in Turin, Alberto Sartoris (Italy, 1901 – 1998) trained as an architect in Switzerland and became one of the leading theorists and writers of the Modern Movement. Sartoris was the man who put the word “functionalist” into the architectural vocabulary. For him it meant something specific: “The term functional”, Sartoris said, “is an approximate term that justifies our movement . . . it is a term that suits all styles but the way I used it, you see, it meant this particular movement, of pure art. It had nothing to do with lyrical rationalism, geometric and linear – the kind that people most objected to at the time…”
“Our” movement in this context means the modern tendency started by the group of architects under Le Corbusier. The Functionalist Group was officially founded at La Sarraz in 1928 and called CIAM (Congrés Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne). CIAM, Sartoris stressed, operated at “an international level” and today it is still “being carried on by the young architects from Ticino, like Mario Botta.”
Alberto Sartoris was Le Corbusier’s choice as the Italian representative to CIAM. He was not popular with his own countrymen who placed less faith in Italian support for modern architecture than Corbusier or Karl Moser. Sartoris recalled that they “looked for government support. The congrès was set up because Le Corbusier and the major architects of the time thought that governments’ support would be decisive in the development of the new architecture.”
Sartoris revealed that Karl Moser “also thought that one day Mussolini would ask Le Corbusier to build a new town” in Italy. In fact, he did not.
Moser’s position in the early years of CIAM was critical and it was to him that the Italian architects wrote to protest about Sartoris’s membership of the congrès. “Sartoris cannot represent us because he does not belong to the architects union or to the Order of Fascist Architects; we do not want him as our representative”, wrote Piero Bottoni, a Communist.
Throughout all this Sartoris himself remained a firmly convinced Modernist and grew in stature within CIAM through his numerous writings and his innumerable projects. He traveled widely too at the turn of the 1930s and was constantly broke, although he was always considered wealthy because of his sartorial elegance and self-confident gestures. Now over 80, he does not seem to have lost any of that sophistication. He remembers those days with good grace: “I could not have afforded a secretary . . . nor draughtsmen. In fact, later when I began getting more commissions I never employed draughtsmen, only students worked for me! And all the drawings were done by my own hand.” He has produced 700 or so major schemes of which only about 50 have been built.
He began practicing in the mid-1920s and soon after designed what he now calls “the first Italian modern building” in 1927 – the Artisans Pavilion in Turin (since destroyed). But his first major building project, for the Turinese silk magnate Gualino, was a splendid theatre (often dismissed by critics as neo-Classical) which according to Sartoris “was in fact . . . really mysterious and metaphysical – it was red, grey and black.”
The early work for Gualino will form the subject matter of a major exhibition on Sartoris’s metaphysical and coloured architecture in Turin later this year.
Besides his distinctive “axonometric” drawing style – reproduced for posterity in his numerous publications – it is probably his use of colour that makes his work so memorable and important.
He recalls that he “used colour when it was difficult to produce it” and he confesses that his interest in it derives as much from his work as an art critic as from his interest in the architecture of the Dutch De Stijl group. “For me colour represents the fourth dimension of architecture, it provides its dynamic quality and aesthetic character. Black gives depth, yellow gives sunshine all the year.”
Sartoris wrote, in a small publication on the Italian visionary Sant ‘Elia, that “architecture had been invented by painters, not by architects.”
How does he view his lifetime as a chief propagandist of Functional architecture and his own postliminy? He replies with characteristic, and indeed justifiable, confidence: “I have not actually built many of my projects – but all my ideas, all my axonometrics, all my principles can be seen realised in other architectures not built by me. I am happy about this.” — Dennis Sharp, 2019