The Domus articles you liked most this year

From Brutalism in Italy to Brad Pitt’s new villa, from the inescapable sneakers to Nicola Lagioia’s house, here are the most popular articles along with the videos you liked on social media.

The end of the year, a time for evaluations. And an excellent opportunity to be surprised by what has happened in the last twelve months. Between great confirmations and unexpected results, that’s what happens when you look at the list of articles published on the Domus website that you, dear readers (or as it is often said in the digital context, “users”), have liked most here (increasingly through direct access to the homepages) or on our ever-expanding digital platforms, on our social media, or in one of our newsletters, to which you can subscribe here. This shortlist of articles is dominated by “collections,” or articles that bring together several examples of the same type. And there is something for everyone, from infrastructures (train stations), to the dense archive piece on the 50 most important houses ever published in Domus in its almost 100-year history, to fashion (sneakers), to abandonment, almost in a nostalgic leap towards the 90s, to the weird (weirdest skyscrapers), a category that dominates in every field of knowledge and entertainment. There is, of course, Brutalism, which has gone from a niche phenomenon to a ubiquitous social media trend. But there’s also room for films, which always perform well at Domus thanks to the affinity between cinema, design and architecture, for gossip, which is popular everywhere, and for our series “a casa di” (at home with), here with the Italian writer Nicola Lagioia, the most read this year. Finally, a bridge to the future: we decided to add three pieces of content created for social media and not for the website, namely three reels that we published on our TikTok and Instagram, projecting ourselves already into a year in which our digital presence will be even more pervasive and less and less tied to the idea of being a mere “digital conversion” of a paper magazine into digital. Because they said the future would be in the digital world, but that future is already the present.

“Everything is Architecture”, wrote Hans Hollein in 1968, at the height of the radical and international design movements. In the past, architecture was an art exclusively reserved for public buildings, monuments and aristocratic palaces, so the simple houses were hardly ever involved in the projects that have made the history of architecture, even though it is common knowledge that there also exists, especially for this archetype, an “architecture without architects”, as Giuseppe Pagano and Bernard Rudofsky taught us. Read more

If sometimes wrecking balls and explosive mines are greeted with relief by those who perceive in a specific built work a disfigurement to urban decorum or human dignity (just think of the vituperated Vele in Scampia), it also happens that the destruction of an architecture takes place with deep regret beyond the Kantian aesthetic judgement of the “beautiful” or other subjectivistic evaluative parameters. Read more

Over the centuries, public art has mainly been identified with the 'monument', understood as a hagiographic tool. But from the 20th century onwards, celebratory ambitions were abandoned in favour of more general communicative objectives linked to the context of reference. Read more

As Domus has already recounted, Brutalism developed from the 1950s onward, a time when architectural theory was reformulating the lexicon of building to cope with the needs of a society wounded by war and ready to start again. The result is an architecture that seeks to free itself from the rigidities of the Modern Movement, stripped down to the bone and unashamedly anti-hedonistic, privileging ethics over aesthetics and characterised by a straightforward functionalism, hierarchical structure and plasticity of volumes. Read more


In the Domus 1066 editorial, Jean Nouvel wrote that architecture, like living beings, is too often irresponsibly abandoned, forgotten, or exploited. For architecture to last, it must be kept alive, so that it can adapt to the new circumstances of the time. Orphans of forward-looking stewardships, sometimes distracted or dormant, these architectures have given a civic look to institutions and powers, hosted symbolic events, and welcomed local populations, marking historical seasons and collective imageries. Read more

From Foster to Nouvel, Calatrava to Hadid, a review of excellent projects that make a home for some of the most celebrated wines on the planet. Read more

The minimalist home has not always been an architectural theme. In the Western world, design culture has associated a certain size – minimal – with a certain function – housing – only in the last century. Primarily, the minimalist home has been intended as the initial house for everyone. Beginning from the late 1910s, architects belonging to the Modern Movement, who held socialist and progressive ideals, created two distinct types of designs: extravagant mansions as manifestos for wealthy and educated clients, and small but “dignified” dwellings to be mass-produced in large quantities. The modernist existenzminimum, available in various forms, embodies simplicity and lacks ornamentation, as these features are essential for enabling industrialization and the construction of vast quantities in a truly democratic manner. Read more

“How do I explain to my wife that when I look out the window I’m working?” said Joseph Conrad, author of Heart of Darkness. But that’s certainly not the case with Nicola Lagioia. In his Roman home, which he shares with his wife, the writer Chiara Tagliaferri, no explanations are necessary because they both share the same profession. Of all the jobs and vocations, being a writer is one that by its very nature defies the separation of work and private life. Read more

Left without a foothold in Los Angeles, Brad Pitt – famous architecture lover – bought one of the villas that have made the history of the city: the Steel House, a small steel and glass pavilion built in 1960 in the hills of Los Feliz and designed by the little-known Neil M. Johnson. Read more

In the French Riviera, on the hills of Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, the Villa Grand Cap, designed by the French architect and designer Jean Nouvel, hit the market for 46€ million. The 5.866-square-feet house is developed over five levels, and is characterized by a steel structure that supports a large glazed roof, which creates an extraordinary dialogue with the surrounding nature and floods every room with light. Read more

“Melt all the bells to make as many rails for new ultra-fast trains”: if he were still among us, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s eyes would shine if he saw the trains and stations of the High Speed Railway, a manifesto of the spectacular progress in mechanical and infrastructural technology that he so much desired. Read more

CityLife. Photo by Marco Menghi

As early as the 1960s, Gio Ponti stated in a famous television interview that a successful skyline does not consist of isolated skyscrapers – it’s made of clusters of tall buildings that can be seen from afar over the urban fabric. At that time, only a few towers of the Business District proposed by the 1953 Master Plan were under construction in Milan. It was only between 2000 and 2010 that some of the “clusters” envisioned by Ponti were built in the Lombard capital, along with two major urban projects: Porta Nuova and CityLife. Read more

Murales di Keith Haring all'interno del Palladium, Ney York, 1985. Foto di Timothy Hursley, Garvey Simon Gallery

It took less than three years, from 1977 to 1980, to not only turn the world’s clubbing imaginaire upside down but to unleash a totalizing revolution in aesthetic and social visions. Those were the disco years, the three years we mentioned were the whole lifespan of Studio 54 in New York (but it will not be alone, between Paradise Garage and other iconic clubs). Once these years were over, the Studio closed, founders Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager went through a fair amount of trouble with the law, and by the mid-1980s they were ready to write another chapter of cultural history: but everything has changed, New York had changed, society with its desires had changed. Read more
 

Lamda Development unveiled the design of Athens Riviera Tower, Greece’s first skyscraper designed by Foster + Partners in Hellinikon, the largest urban regeneration project in Europe, developed on the site of the former airport in southern Athens and hosting a 400-hectares park, luxury homes, hotels, a casino, a marina, retail space, and offices. Read more

The large installations at Milan Design Week are those projects that the public, especially the non-expert public, loves because it brings them closer to the world of design. They somehow bridge the gap between the old democratic aspirations of design and the fact that it has eventually become a niche nowadays. Read more

TV series are one of the most interesting phenomena of our time. Around them, images and visions of the world are formed in a transgenerational and hybrid dimension. The repetition and expansion of content are certainly the strategic characteristics that keep an everyday wider audience glued to various devices (computers, TV, smartphones, tablets). Read more
 

From the 1920s to the present day, there is a wealth of evidence of how architectural design has responded to the extravagances and excesses of famous people, sometimes obsessed with the idea of a residence to match their ego. They show how exuberant and unusual projects have been the backdrop not only to glittering parties and receptions, but to some power games and political events. Read more

The race to climb the highest is not the only competition in the world of architecture. On the contrary, the prevailing trend in recent years seems to be to innovate the typology of the skyscraper: instead of battling to have the tallest skyscraper in the world, the great global metropolises are seeing the growth of huge iconic objects, whose shapes recall everyday objects, animal silhouettes... 
We started an exploration of this world of shapes in 2021, and we are back now with this year's latest episodes. Read more
 

Born between the First and the Second World War, sneakers – also known as plimsolls, pumps, crepes, kicks and God knows how many other slang terms – were, at first, the outcome of studies on rubber and its applications, in fact some of the pioneering sneaker brands (like Dunlop and Superga) did all but fashion design. Although initially conceived for sporting purposes, it is their adoption into streetwear in the Sixties what truly revolutionised their role and semantics for ever. Read more

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