THE “Classical Sustrate” Creates Very Modern Masterpieces Villa Bianca in Seveso / Il “Substrato Classico” crea capolavori modernissimi Villa Bianca a Seveso

The Villa Bianca marks an important step in all of Terragni’s research. Its observation suggests an association with the villas of Le Corbusier. The elements of its vocabulary are common; while they speak the same language, everything, down to the details, takes on the sense of a diverse necessity. The same strip window changes its detail, it is marked by the thick stone cornices that create the projecting frames precisely to indicate the desire to invade the exterior. Not to mention the “betrayal” of building with solid walls, and no longer atop pilotis. Villa Bianca is not only an original synthesis of Purism and Neoplasticism, but also represents the extraordinary affirmation of that trend that held that pure and stereometric blocks belonged to “our” architecture. It is an interweaving of motifs that only a work deriving from a cycle of experimentation could produce. The contradiction between modernity and tradition, between the temple and the machine, between symmetry and asymmetry, are revealed in the heart of architectural research: the presence of the pure volume could coexist with the dynamic, asymmetrical, spatial, abstract and naturalistic tension that projects it outward.