by Claudio Camponogara

Vito e Gustavo Latis. Frammenti di città, Maria Vittoria Capitanucci, Skira, Milano 2008 (pp. 192, € 30,00)

In Domus issue 205, of January 1946, Ernesto Rogers wrote: “Homes everywhere are cracking up (we would say taking in water if they were ships). Everywhere, the sound of the wind comes in and the crying of women and children leaks out. We ought to be running over with bricks, beams or panes of glass, but here we are with a magazine. We do not give bread to the hungry or a raft to the shipwrecked, but words… A magazine can be instrumental, a sieve that sorts the criteria behind a decision… It must form tastes, methods and morals, as terms of the same function. We must build a society. Let us all help each other find a harmony between the human measure and divine proportion.” This long quotation clearly illustrates the role played by the Latis practice in the postwar renewal of Milan’s urban fabric. This role has at last been analysed by Maria Vittoria Capitanucci. The book Vito e Gustavo Latis. Frammenti di città, with a preface by Gillo Dorfles and an essay by Augusto Rossari, is a careful investigation of Milan from its reconstruction to the present day, seen through the steady and elegant work of two local professionals.

They were the silent protagonists of a city that was being rebuilt in fragments. Much attention was focused on a quality result that would play a positive role, based on personal commitment and a rigorous search within the trade. Or, as in the words of the architect Gandolfi: “A spirit of research peculiar to builder-architects rather than draughtsmen… It was in fact the attention paid to the construction method, the search for a good mix and a solid fabric and structure… a humble return to the theme, the matter, the impact and the shortcomings of the building that must be and is erected.” They designed quickly and built additions in the old urban fabric that satisfied new needs. This was done via a poetic of civil construction that could repair the lacerations of the bombing and restore important traditional values. It was, perhaps, the last generation of architects who entered the profession in those years and, albeit with conflicting research and creations, had a common cultural denominator that set them apart within the “Milanese school”. “The Latis brothers,” wrote Rossari, “form a group that shares the great seriousness and professional consistency of the Milanese school, admired more for its technical ability to provide answers to clients’ problems and needs than for its quest for a style.” Vito and Gustavo Latis are in the category of “prose writers”, as Zevi called it, as they were scarcely drawn to the theorisation and creation of “works of art”. They can primarily be seen as two refined architects, attentive to contemporary production and technology, and also ready to seize on various cultural stimuli and work them into their skilled routine building practice.

The buildings by the Latis brothers fitted into the urban fabric without fear of being classed as modern architecture. Their composition allowed the roots of their expression and the technological elaboration of the form to emerge. The Latis brothers’ professional approach always contained some sort of ambivalence. Sometimes they wanted to express the charm and beauty of the function and the structure, and they brought it out forcefully. This was the case of their apartment block in Viale Monterosa, in which all the required structural elements were declared in their entirety. Other times, with the same sure elegance, they would opt to conceal their existence and favour the fantasy and rhythm of the composition. This is the case with the building in Piazza della Repubblica, in which the application of metal sections over the facade and the insertion of closed bow-window blocks gave the front a dynamic effect of solids and voids that created a swing towards the abstract, a trend common to other protagonists on the city scene, above all Asnago and Vender. In this search, the Latis brothers reconnected with the cultural climate inaugurated in those years in Milan. This had seen the flourishing of the albeit short-lived experience of the Concrete Art Movement, which had imagined and sometimes achieved a successful synthesis of the arts. The main aim was to break up the stereometry of the building and to “bring together the free flowing surfaces of Dutch Neo-Plasticism and the Rationalist grid”, as Vito Latis declared. The efforts to blend the building with its urban context brought new solutions, as in Via Turati where the building is distinguished by its mixed uses but also its urban and scenic position. Capitanucci wrote, “The fragmentation of the masses also brought unexpected views, different orientations and, hence, type variations within the same context. This was so in Via Turati, where a smaller building in Via Montello is inserted into the main one. The folding of the masses in which the block turns or is attached to the main one was stressed here by opening the loggia and by the narrow window on the inside.” So, they passed from the initial rationalist position, acquired with participation in the MSA and expressed in a simple and intensely truthful language, to a renewed modernity and then rediscovered tradition and history. The latter occurred when they renovated a building in Via Bigli, where “history and nature played a founding role in the architectural project and, as we played at revealing the old, the language became increasingly modern, in terms of compositional choices and materials”. In the 1970s and ’80s the practice’s works moved outside the city and consisted partially in the construction of religious buildings as well as several industrial and residential developments. This period is also fully illustrated in the text, which is full of excellent photographs and documented with archive drawings and exhaustive entries drawn up by Gianluca Cesana, Federico Ferrari and Stefano Poli. Maria Vittoria Capitanucci’s book must also be praised for “opening a drawer” that contains a clearly visible page of Milan’s history, its image and its culture, which was subsequently regrettably lost and, perhaps for this very reason, now deserves a painstaking rediscovery and appreciation.

Claudio Camponogara Architect