Alessandro Mendini's design for the facade of this house appeared on the cover of the Italian design magazine Casabella, during the international debate sparked by radical architecture in the early 1970s. Mendini's drawings embody two of the opposing views prevalent within the debate: they reveal an architecture of unmediated structures not intellectualized by means of drawing and an architecture that is abstract, conceptual, and full of linguistic references. In this drawing, which shows the front of the house in muted light, Mendini has projected onto the flat facade an image of the elevation of a Greek temple, the lower section and columnar spacing of which determine the proportions and fenestration. Mendini believed that architecture, if connected to the image of ancient construction, could gain in energy and feeling.
Publication excerpt from an essay by Bevin Cline and Tina di Carlo, in Terence Riley, ed., The Changing of the Avant-Garde: Visionary Architectural Drawings from the Howard Gilman Collection, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2002, p. 106.
