Near Rome, there is a living house, one of the most eccentric pieces of 20th-century Italian architecture: you can now visit it

In Fregene, there is a house that was never meant to remain the same. When Giuseppe Perugini, Uga De Plaisant, and Raynaldo Perugini designed it between 1968 and 1975, they envisioned a building capable of growing, transforming, and incorporating new modules over time. They called it "Casa Albero" (Tree House). Today, it is no longer inhabited, but it remains accessible through public openings organized by Open House Roma, where Raynaldo himself acts as a guide.

Although often misunderstood and referred to as a "tree house" or a "house among the trees," the most original of all holiday villas on the Roman coast is truly a Casa Albero (tree-house). This means it is capable of growing, branching out, and bearing fruit, refusing to accept the equation that architecture must equal immobility. It is certainly not the only one: between the 1960s and 1970s, there was a global urge to imagine buildings capable of changing according to needs, growing, or being "pruned." In Japan, this was called Metabolist architecture, and before it was demolished in 2022, an example of it could be seen in Tokyo’s 1972 Nakagin Capsule Tower: a large concrete trunk onto which capsules—mini-homes equipped with everything—were bolted and unbolted.

Similarly, the seaside house that Giuseppe Perugini built for himself, his wife Uga De Plaisant, and his son Raynaldo Perugini—the "three Ps," all of whom were architects—can also grow. It is not inhabited, but neither is it abandoned or forgotten: from Bottega Veneta’s campaign to Fendi’s—staged there at the personal request of Karl Lagerfeld himself—several films and even a music video by the Dark Polo Gang have all contributed to making it famous.

The house is partially hidden and shaded by the evergreen canopies of pine and holm oak trees, enclosed by a low wall of concrete and red-painted iron—the same materials that make up the entire structure. A system of reinforced concrete pillars suspends and supports surfaces, also in concrete, which serve as floors and perimeter walls, creating a play of varying levels and openings filled by red metal window frames, much like other elements: the joints and the staircase that lead into this living experiment. Breaking away from the grid of orthogonal lines and surfaces, the utility areas declare their function through the convex shape of their shells. Much like a warp and weft, new components can be added to the network of structural segments, or existing ones—produced in a workshop, transported to the site, and assembled—can be replaced or removed. To accentuate the feeling of an infinite space, a pool of water lies beneath the massive, brutalist structure, reflecting and multiplying it. Of the interiors, now stripped of all movable furniture, the granite floors remain, and one can appreciate the different floor levels which, without relying on the device of a "wall," define the rooms.

However, the Perugini villa in Fregene is not just one architectural experiment; it is three. Within the same plot, alongside the large Casa Albero (Tree House), stand two domestic structures that were completely removed from any existing reference at the time, and remain so even today. They are named Palla (Sphere) and Cubetti (Little Cubes) because of their shapes. The former is a five-meter-diameter sphere where a transverse cut creates a circular entrance portal; it was intended to function as an independent mini-house, but the interiors were never completed. On the other hand, the two concrete shells had perfect acoustic characteristics, which Raynaldo used for his rehearsal room. The Cubetti, meanwhile, are three modules generated from the square form and built using the same materials: in less than 40 square meters, they accommodate two bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a kitchen.

Of all the attributes assigned to this house—experimental, futuristic, brutalist, sculptural, infinite, constructivist—the most significant perhaps lies in the fact that it is a realized utopia: a laboratory where the concepts and theories of utopian architects were brought to life, making it an exception among the many projects that remained only on paper. Among these, the most avant-garde by Giuseppe Perugini himself is perhaps the Cybernetic Hospital, a building that imagines the various functional wards as molecules aggregated electronically and capable of moving as needed, upending the archetype of hospital architecture, which is primarily based on the logic of circulation.

Immagine di apertura: Courtesy Open CIty Roma