Giuseppe Pagano Pogatschnig

Giuseppe Pagano Pogatschnig (1896-1945) was one of the fathers of rationalist architecture in Italy. His life, so full of significant events, spanned some of the most significant historical and political events of the twentieth century, which Pagano always faced while maintaining an ideal of coherence with his own ideas that would eventually cost him his life. Born with the name of Giuseppe Pogatschnig in Istria, at the time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, at the outbreak of the First World War his irredentist positions led him to enlist as a volunteer in the Italian army. Wounded and captured several times, he would obtain several medals for valor at the end of the conflict and would be among the protagonists of the Fiume enterprise. His adherence to fascism dates back to this period, understood by Pagano as a revolutionary movement capable of making a break with the past and liberating the best energies of Italian society. Overcoming the past was also one of the key concepts of his architecture, a discipline he studied in the post-war period at the Polytechnic of Turin: hostile to any monumentalism and now outdated decorative frills, Pagano advocated the idea of a sober architecture based solely on rational foundations. Principles perfectly embodied in the Palazzo Gualino in Turin (1928), one of the first rationalist architectures to see the light in Italy, which he built together with the younger Gino Levi-Montalcini who was his long-time partner. He exercised his skills as a populariser and polemicist during his long editorship of the magazine Casabella (1930-43, in the early years in collaboration with another great architect, Edoardo Persico), alongside whom he also briefly directed Domus in 1941. However, it would be wrong to consider him primarily a theoretician: many of his projects actually saw the light, leaving a tangible mark on the cities in which he worked. Among these, for example, we remember the Institute of Physics in the University City of Rome (1934) and the headquarters of the Luigi Bocconi University in Milan (1936-42). For some of his projects he also designed furniture, also imbued with his typical functionalist minimalism (one of them, the Chichibio storage unit, was later re-edited by Zanotta starting in the 1980s). Gradually more and more critical of the fascist regime, during the Second World War he got closer to the Resistance movements and was arrested for this. He died in the Mauthausen concentration camp a few days before the camp was liberated.