 AUTHOR: MARG ARET RHODES.

MARG ARET RHODES

 DATE OF PUBLICAT ION: 0 4 .16 .15 .04 .16 .15

 TIME OF PUBLICAT ION: 8 :0 0 AM.8 :00 AM

THE RADICAL LE CORBUSIER DESIGN THAT SHAPED

ITALY
Together, the 99 two- and three-minutes films Space Caviar created make a composite portrait of the Dom-Ino’s legacy. SPACE CAVIAR
A beautiful series of micro-documentaries, called 99 Dom-Ino, spotlights buildings around Italy inspired by Le Corbusier's Maison Dom-Ino. S P A C E
CAVIAR
Maison Dom-Ino was a World War I-era plan Le Corbusier came up with for standardized housing. S P A C E CAVI AR
It was radical at the time. Instead of building walls, the plan called for reinforced concrete beams and open floor plans. S P A C E CAVI AR
Le Corbusier released the plan without a client. In the 1920s and 1930s, he published the ideas, and avant-garde architects took notice. The plan inspired
legions of buildings across the Italian (and Greek, and French) countryside. S P A C E C A V I A R
Today, the structures are everywhere. Space Caviar founder Joseph Grima says they're even regarded in some places as an eyesore. S P A C E CAVIAR
Some are inhabited. S P A C E CAVIAR
Some are not. S P A C E CAVI AR
Together, the 99 two- and three-minutes films Space Caviar created make a composite portrait of the Dom-Ino’s legacy. SPACE CAVIAR
A beautiful series of micro-documentaries, called 99 Dom-Ino, spotlights buildings around Italy inspired by Le Corbusier's Maison Dom-Ino. S P A C E
CAVIAR
IF YOU’VE SPENT any time in the Italian countryside, you’ve likely seen them:
skeletal, concrete structures that consist of little more than a couple floors suspended
by columns, connected by a single staircase. “It’s one of those things that makes up
the Italian landscape today, on the tops of hills, by the beach, on the seaside,” says
architect and writer Joseph Grima. “Some are in states of disrepair, and some are fully
functional buildings.”
Le Corbusier, the famous Swiss-French architect and pioneer of modernism, didn’t
design these structures, but they bear his fingerprints. Each is built in the image of the
Maison Dom-Ino, his World War I-era blueprint for standardized housing. When Le
Corbusier unveiled his drawing in 1914, he had an idea without a client. And while it
never took off as he envisioned, it was adapted by a generation of Italian architects.
Grima, founder of the design group Space Caviar, grew up in Italy amidst these odd
structures. Like skyscrapers in New York and Pizza Huts across America, they are
steeped in design history but rarely noticed. When they are, it’s not always favorably:
“It’s a design innovation that’s been turned into something, especially in Italy, that is
regarded as something completely the opposite. It’s a form of architectural
blasphemy. It became synonymous with an eyesore, and a dilapidated landscape,”
Grima says.
There’s a strange contradiction here. Whether the locals like them or not, the Maison
Dom-Ino structures are as much a part of Italian life as the Mediterranean climate, or
the wine. Vasco Rossi, the “Italian Bruce Springsteen,” according to Grima, grew up
in one. When an earthquake wrecked Sicily, many of the ensuing conversations
circled around what happened to the stalwart Dom-Inos. The structures created what
Grima calls “a stage for the theater of everyday life,”—one that’s featured in 99 Dom-
Ino, a film series Grima created with Space Caviar.

Radical for Its Time

Le Corbusier, perhaps the most famous Modernist architect, first revealed a blueprint
for the Maison Dom-Ino just over a century ago. It was a stark design of concrete
slabs, columns, and a staircase. It was revolutionary in its simplicity.
The point of the Dom-Ino—the name is “domus” and “innovation” spliced together—
was to reduce a housing structure to its most skeletal form, so inhabitants could decide
for themselves where walls should go and how their lives would sprawl out inside.
We’re familiar with this idea today, thanks to open plan offices and airy loft
apartments. But in the past, homeowners didn’t have this freedom. “Earlier architects
followed conventional room arrangements,” says Mary McLeod, a professor of
architecture at Columbia University. Some of those architects also dabbled with
reinforced concrete, but it was Le Corbusier who created a technology that buried
steel beams within concrete slabs. This “pancake scheme,” McLeod says, “allows for
what he called theplan libre, or free plan, where the walls can be placed anywhere. It
allows for a new aesthetic possibility: walls that don’t come to ceilings, shaped rooms,
a more fluid open space.”
The Maison Dom-Ino was a radical idea. Le Corbusier pursued patents for his beam-
less building method, and published writings about the Dom-Ino system in the 1920s
and the 1930s. The ideas didn’t go unnoticed by architects at the time—it was of
particular interest to more avant garde builders, some of whom helped proliferate
Dom-Ino-style reinforced concrete housing across Italy.

The Theater of Everyday Life

Grima and collaborator Martina Muzi found 140 Dom-Ino structures around Italy and
filmed micro-documentaries about 99 of them, a few of which we’re able to show
here. The narration is sparse, but the cinematography is jaw-dropping. Together, the
99 two- and three-minutes films create a composite portrait of the Dom-Ino’s legacy.
Some, like Vasco Rossi’s old home, are well-known. Rossi doesn’t live there
anymore, but fans make pilgrimages to the house, scrawling notes on the fence in
spray paint, the same way people do at Jim Morrison’s grave in Paris. Visitors come
just to take their photograph in front of house, unwittingly including Le Corbusier’s
design idea in the backdrop of their photo albums.
In 2001, the entire nation saw another Dom-Ino appear again and again on television,
when 16-year-old Erika La Nardo and her boyfriend were arrested in the grisly double
murder of La Nardo’s mother and brother. The home loomed large during the
investigation: It wasn’t just the scene of the stabbings, it was the backdrop for a
Shakespearean family murder.
Grima says his aim was to “create a portrait of living in Italy,” and to show how the
act of inhabiting these homes changed over the last 100 years. In southern Italy,
Grima says, it’s common to see rebar columns sticking out on top of buildings. The
columns mean additional floors can be quickly added later, as the family grows. Other
times, the naked rebar is a foil against paying property taxes, since unfinished
buildings are exempt. In Sicily, after the earthquake, Grima says, “the house became a
pretext for understanding how people’s lives were affected.”
These stories suggest that even though the official design for the Dom-Ino was never
realized, its creator’s wishes for the system came true. “Although Le Corbusier made
his proposal for a very specific deployment of this technology, we are convinced he
was just as interested in the ways that each individual creates their own form of
architecture,” Grima says. Life spilled out in unexpected ways.
http://www.wired.com/2015/04/radical-le-corbusier-design-shaped-italy/ (Accessed 06.06.2015)