Each year, Domus devotes its December issue to Italy, where it was founded and from which it continues to look at the world.

Last year we decided to explore its frailty; this year we have chosen its counterpart: the pursuit of excellence, the practice of quality, a skill that the world has always admired and helps us look to the future in the present period of great disruption. For this theme, no cover seemed better than the Sant’Elia Kindergarten in Como designed by Giuseppe Terragni in 1934. A pinnacle of Rationalism, since the 1960s it has been left in a state of shameful and absurd abandonment. We believe this cover therefore illuminates not only Italian architecture and design, but also the debate on “Italian cultural identity,” which we have been forced to engage in since the installation of Giorgia Meloni’s government.

The new executive’s most criticised category, cultural identity, may make for gossip, maybe even too much, but it is generally resorted to in the absence of other arguments, particularly competence and substance. And saying that the arguments do exist. One example is the proposed cut of 800 million euros from the PINQuA urban regeneration projects and another 800 million from the degraded peripheries programme, written into the Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) with already signed conventions, started contracts, and activated private contributions. The executive is evaluating these measures, contained in the budget under discussion in Parliament, which not only contradicts the majority line – in favour of an urban regeneration law – but would also deal yet another blow to the protection of Italian heritage, of which the Sant’Elia Kindergarten is a perfect metaphor. A dark metaphor, despite being white, but in which colour has nothing to do with political memories.

The kindergarten was erected to meet the needs of the new working-class district growing up in those years. Built in masonry on a reinforced concrete frame, it is characterised by large, distinct forms: solids, without indulging in protrusions from the facade plane; and voids, with large glazed surfaces to ensure bright interiors, transparency, and sightlines between the interior and the garden outside. In this sense, it expresses a certain affinity with the nearby Casa del Fascio, also by Terragni, but in contrast, it is laid out on a single floor. The large windows that develop the concept of an open-air school, the carefully arranged interiors, and the refined furnishings, partly designed by the architect himself, made it exceptional, unique, and immediately copied in the advanced countries of Northern Europe, particularly Scandinavia.

An icon of excellence and a pinnacle of “Made in Italy,” many critics see the Sant’Elia Kindergarten as one of the 20th century’s ten most important architectural works. But like all Terragni’s works, it is much more. It is a metaphor for a passion that goes beyond architecture to reveal it as a social art, a spiritual elevation that influences every child, belongs to every citizen, and modifies every nation. This is why attempts to include Terragni among the champions of Fascism make us smile, because if we cannot separate his works from their political sense, we cannot forget that their notability lies in Terragni’s civic significance for the world, as Daniel Libeskind observed (The Terragni Atlas: Built Architecture, 2004).

Terragni responded to the issue of cultural identity by creating works that addressed the fatal rift that the regime’s decisions had created in Italian society. This is also why “Terragni’s Fascism” needs to be completely revised. Because Terragni – an architect who built houses and things – was forced to take part in the tragedy of the Russian campaign. That decision destroyed the lives of over 400,000 Italians and their families, with the responsibility resting forever on Mussolini alone. Faced with the catastrophe, of society but even before that of the ideas in which they had believed, many intellectuals withdrew from the world or repudiated their choices. But Terragni remained faithful to his idea of civil commitment, in the form of an architecture of the present that questioned the spirit and looked to the future.

To paraphrase Libeskind: “Terragni never changed direction until the end. He believed that architecture was as spiritual a mission as music, poetry, the foundations of civil societies. Baudelaire said that there are two ways to enter reality: one is to take drugs, the other is to read Rousseau’s Social Contract. Terragni chose the Social Contract that Rousseau wrote in an age of revolution and awakening of the world, a world represented by Terragni in his amazing and extraordinary project for the Sala O for the tenth anniversary of the birth of Fascism.”

The kindergarten’s hallmarks, and of all Terragni’s architecture, are a reduction to the essential, the purification of encumbrances, and presences that become absences and rise towards the light of the spirit. It corresponds to the dismantling of memory and his personal battle against the spectres of history, striving towards the positive future of humanity. For this reason, in the kindergarten he imagined a childhood enveloped in light, with the linear and impalpable walls protecting children and leading them towards the future, a dimension that is and remains the true physical space of his work.

Devoted to this spiritual mission, in the 1920s and 1930s, Terragni elaborated a lexicon that would endow modernity with forms, but above all with a new, anti-rhetorical and anti-academic reasoning, made up of shadows and slits, a passion for humanity, an upheaval in ancient meanings, a proposal for an ever-contemporary society. His was a discipline of transcendence, of built forms that aspire to freedom as the first and last condition of humanity, and that always tell a story. Because it is not silent and abstract art but a form of concrete communication.

Named after such a gifted architect who died young, the kindergarten demonstrates that culture and identity must never oppose the values of the past, but embody a simple and luminous sensibility to the future, a harmonious relationship between the visible and the invisible in the destinies of humanity. Bruno Zevi understood these harmonies perfectly when he questioned the municipality, the building’s owner, after three Swiss architects had reported serious damage done by maintenance work in 1968. The municipality replied that everything was up to standard, swiftly proceeding with restoration work that distorted the building. “It would have been better to demolish it,” Zevi commented at the inauguration, when asked for a verdict he would have preferred not to utter. In the 1980s, two of Terragni’s grandchildren, Emilio and Carlo, tried to return to the origins with a scholarly restoration. 

His great-granddaughter Elisabetta also worked on it in 2002, slowing its death throes, which culminated in 2018 when the kindergarten hosted its last class of children. Since then there has been little noise and lots of silence, against which Attilio, the son of Terragni’s brother, continues to struggle, also calling on Italy’s National Trust (FAI).

The metaphor is dark but all too clear. Just as anti-Fascism is not Fascism in reverse, the Meloni government’s taking care of the Sant’Elia Kindergarten – in the form of tangible resources to remedy the degradation of Italian heritage – would be the best response regarding cultural identity. Today cultural identity cannot lie in the parody of important but little-understood authors, nor in the accreditation with pseudo-holders of knowledge. Let us hope there is more to it than replacing enemy orchestral players with friendly ones.