Tedeschi knew what “house” means. Among all the architects we have known, admired and published in Domus, Tedeschi is still unique in this primitive quality of knowing. And we mustn’t be deceived by the humour with which Tedeschi talked and wrote. Like kids, he could be on intimate terms with architecture and art. He knew what they are. Tedeschi – who joined Domus in 1948, the first architect on the magazine’s editorial staff with Ponti back as editor – was the young talent who proved immediately congenial to Chessa, Viganò and Ponti himself.
I am thinking, at this moment, of Viganò, whom Tedeschi published as soon as he got to Domus (n. 231, 1948). Viganò’s bent plywood generated an unforgotten page/signal at Domus. In the same issue, Viganò’s Milan “studio”, with the two large Tintoretto altarpieces suspended back to back and “hovering” in space, launched an essential message by Tedeschi on the subject of cohabitation with art. For Chessa, I am thinking of the “polyhedric” house that Tedeschi published, splendidly, in 1952 (Domus 268). Here the tilted walls and the isolated “stair/woodpile” (with “flying” baluster) restore to architecture – Tedeschi wrote – “that fantastic and acrobatic possibility which stage sets can have in a theatre”… “The living space can, like a cave or a suspended cell, or a keel turned upside-down, be a body to be touched, felt or sensed, with head, hands, feet…”
This contrasts with the rational, “abstract, mathematical, purely intellectual and visual” dogma of “drawn” architecture. This was the Tedeschi who, three years earlier, in the Faust 1949 project, had thought, for a solitary scholar, of a “vertical living” within a very high “niche”, a niche like those to be found in ancient architecture. No fear of ancient architecture! No fear of the concave, of the convex, of the arched, or of the massive, which ancient architecture offers … On the contrary: not fear but fun. A fun granted only to Italian architects, perhaps. (And to children, who know how to “nest” and to “make houses” everywhere). The key, perhaps, to this state of mind lies in maintaining diversity, in not uniforming (surfaces, spaces, materials).
In short, in “maintaining anomaly”. Introducing the “off-scale” (close to Tedeschi’s heart) was likewise a way of “maintaining anomaly” (Domus 246, 1950; Domus 254, 1951). The “fantasy furniture” Tedeschi made for the IX Triennale, 1951, was anomalous design, based as it was on distinguishing and separating form from function (Domus 261, 1951). It is a pleasure to read what Tedeschi writes about that. (Although everything he wrote makes good reading.) In Domus (n. 245, 1950), Tedeschi interviews himself on “the game of inspiration, not of material, that is furniture”: “A bookcase, if the design has the minimum material and the maximum load; with light, I make a solid and a void out of it, enlarge it or reduce it …” and “true furniture is that of Robinson Crusoe: from the Bible to the hatchet. Key furnishing, to our mind, is that of Antonello da Messina, of Dürer: rooms furnished like brains, with objects: pistols, plates, telescopes, lions…” (In his own home in Milan, Tedeschi lived with a giant Melotti – one of the Seven Sages in plaster – among models of sailing-ships and antique weapons (Domus 286, 1953).
His was never a solitary environment. The houses that Tedeschi designed and also built – houses in the country, in a field, near a wood, on a lake, beside a river… – are houses “for many”, as he called them. It was the lives of these many (adults, young people, children) that suggested the architecture: the play of different levels, numerous tiny cells and a very large living room, under the oblique wing of the roof. This wing is necessary. Lisa Ponti
