The aesthetic rhythm of pure forms in Magnaghi –Terzaghi architects’ works

The encounter with Paola Magnaghi Delfino, a mathematician teaching at the Politecnico of Milan, actually the daughter of Augusto Magnaghi, was an opportunity to start a systematic research on the drawings by Magnaghi-Terzaghi’s atelier. Augusto Magnaghi and Mario Terzaghi, even if nowadays less remembered by the storiography, were two of the most important exponents of Modern Architecture in Milan, collaborators of Pietro Lingeri and Giuseppe Terragni. The square and the equilateral triangle at the base of their architectures show a rationality that binds number, shape and size, generating a modern form that bases its rationalist roots in the classical tradition of the History of Architecture of the past. This paper deals with the religious buildings, the Cagnola villa church in Gazzada (1959) and San Filippo Neri in Bovisasca district in Milan (1961) designed with equilateral triangles at the base of the matrix generating the shape. The church of Villa Cagnola has a hall-plan with a fully windowed wall that opens the view from the altar to the pre-existing historical park. The wall has been designed thanks to the skillful combination of equilateral triangles. The church of San Filippo Neri is based on the geometry of the equilateral triangle as well, in fact, has a central hexagonal plan with a series of annexes such as the weekday chapel and baptistery. The reference to regular polygons as the principle of the form and the related traditional value of geometric “perfection” becomes a model of symbolic rationality, and the useful instrument of conception of the sacred space.