Journal

“Aldo Rossi was a lake-lover like me. He really enjoyed retreating to the family’s old house on Lake Mergozzo to write and meditate, and this helped our early friendship in the spring of 1980. He designed some of the most representative objects of the 1980s (…) this as an amateur designer, attracted as always by his beloved architectural constructs …”
Alberto Alessi’s recollections depict Rossi as an architect enamoured of the landscape and the architecture of the Lombardy lakes, along whose banks Roman villas once stood, and where today, alongside aristocratic homes such as Villa Bortolomeo, one can admire the imaginative holiday homes of the Italian middle-classes; those lakes which Rossi himself describes as “a museum of diverse architectural experiences”.
At Suna di Verbania, on the northern shore of Lake Maggiore, Rossi designed a villa which represents the culmination of the relationship between the architect and the Alessi family (manufacturers of household goods). The structure is composed of large, essential, clearly-defined volumes that have been combined in an arrangement that recalls the founding elements of the romantic aristocratic residences of the 19th century, and incorporates an eclectic mixture of styles and materials.
The walls of the villa were built according to the traditional “scagliola” technique: this method, which nowadays is no longer used, can be seen in many of the villas situated along the lakeside, although its roots go back to a much older building technique employed for many years by the peasant farmers and craftsmen of the Upper Verbano district and the Sesia Valley to build their own houses during the winter months, using the stone waste from the cutting of large blocks of granite quarried during the summer months.
The close-knit “weave” of these walls features thin pieces of stone of various shapes, sizes and colours arranged in a stratified manner to give a more “homogeneous”, compact (and only slightly rough) appearance to the facing. A number of different stone varieties have been used: granite from Montorfano, Baveno stone, “beola” and “serizzo” (two varieties of gneiss) – with their leaden grey, silvery grey or grey and ochre colourings. At the villa’s entrance portico, granite is once again the protagonist, forming the drums constituting the powerful columns of a simple trilith completed by a metal architrave, which is highly evocative of a pure, static mechanism.
Special terracotta pieces – from the kilns of Impruneta in Tuscany – have been used to make the turned balustrades and the octagonal-shaped columns of the triple order of loggias that open out towards the lake. The use of brick, both here and in the unusual plastic cornices that emerge from the stone wall around the windows, is an
even clearer sign of the inspiration the architect got from local tradition: indeed, the source declared by the maestro himself was the terracotta sculptures of the processional complex of Sacro Monte.
The reference to historical architecture is confirmed in the main body of the villa, where the corners of the walls feature staggered courses of stone ashlars, a system utilised in the models of villas from the Italian Renaissance onwards. However, this reference is always veiled by a slightly ironic tone. In fact, the relationship between the fineness and the roughness of the various architectural surfaces appears reversed here; where traditional called for the use of a rustic stone in order to give the impression of the strength of the corners of the walls, composed of stones levelled or smoothed by plaster, in the case of Casa Alessi, the staggered courses constitute a mere dentil-like arrangement of flat, white ashlars enclosing the granite surfaces with their lively texture and varied hues.

Davide Turrini

^*The re-edited essay has been taken out from the volume by Alfonso Acocella, Stone architecture. Ancient and modern constructive skills, Milano, Skira-Lucense, 2006, pp. 624.
http://architetturapietra2.sviluppo.lunet.it/libro/
¹Alberto Alessi, La fabbrica dei sogni. Alessi dal 1921, Milan, Electa, 1998, p.52.