Le architetture residenziali di Henri Kleffler a Firenze e a Roma (1866-1876)

The essay aims at illustrating the activity of the Swiss architect Henri Kleffler (1840-1891), trained in the Zurich Polytechnic and active in Italy between the 1860s and 1880s. He realizes several high-classes residencies, of which the known ones are currently: the villini Servadio (1866-1867) in piazza Massimo D’Azeglio in Florence, the villa Malatesta then Mirafiori (from 1871) in via Nomentana, the palazzo Servadio (1872) and the villino Centurini (1872-1874) in piazza dell’Indipendenza, the palazzetta Grant (1872) in via Goito and the palazzetto (1874-1875) in via dei Due Macelli in Rome. Over time, these buildings have been partly transformed and sometimes altered in their distributive-functional scheme; but in some cases to understand the original architectural layout from the historical drawings, highlighting the artistic language of Kleffler is possible. In his buildings, the architect defines the distributive-functional system, the structure, and the decorative apparatus, using innovative technological solutions. From a figurative point of view, Kleffler is inspired by the Renaissance architectural examples, but also by the decorative arts and the industrial design. As a matter of fact, the architect reworks the style of the sixteenth-century with eclectic and fantastic elements. Finally, Kleffler’s thinking is influenced by the theories of Gottfried Semper (1803-1878) on the relationship between art and science, as evidenced by his philosophical writings.