2006 WALL PAINT ASILO SANT'ELIA XXL TXT Como_Italy

Asilo Sant’Elia xxl txt

Terragni Revisited

by Roberto Borghi

A number of buildings designed by Giuseppe Terragni are encountered on taking a walk around Como. Two of these are reconsidered here: the Novocomum residential complex and the Asilo Sant'Elia or the Sant’Elia kindergarten. The first major work of the celebrated rationalist architecture is the subject of a wall painting by Fabrizio Musa of just a year ago, and stands at a short distance from the Cathedral. The Asilo Sant'Elia is portrayed in two large works first shown on Saturday 16 September 2006.
Terragni and Rationalism have become part of the cultural identity of this city. This does not however mean that what are some of the most renowned buildings of the twentieth century are the objects of the curious, attentive and awe-struck gaze of passers-by, which would be the only way to truly appreciate and understand them.
It may well be that the attention that neither the tourist signs nor the centenary celebrations have been able to attract may be drawn by a number of murals that select, cut and open slices, with paradoxical delicateness, of the urban landscape. Sometimes such a revisit, a seeing afresh, is essential to the process of being able to see what routinely passes before our distracted gaze. I have to admit that I too, after being somewhat bewildered by the sight of the outlines of Asilo Sant'Elia obliquely standing out on an industrial wall, made me think it was time to take another and closer look at the original.
Despite being rigorously produced in black and white, with trees in the background and automobiles in the foreground, as if to emphasize an everyday perspective, Sant'Elia XXL.txt I and Sant'Elia XXL.txt II are in their ways monumental works, and not only in terms of their dimensions. The word “monument” comes from the Latin verb “moneo”, to admonish, to reprove or to remind. The wall paintings of Fabrizio Musa are like cautionary reminders that architecture, the city and reality should be viewed with a suitable degree of amazement.