Casa mediterranea, casa araba and primitivism in the writings of Carlo Enrico Rava

摘要

We love the poetry and the primeval power of the formative processes of these simple buildings. We believe that - along with the recent prolific and fantastic technological possibilities - if they could be in our environment and in relation to our culture as much as the man of the earth is in his primitiveness, we could create beautiful and mature things ... Plinio Marconi, 'Architettura minima mediterra-nea e architettura moderna', 1929. In an essay published in Architettura e Arti Decorative magazine, the critic Plinio Marconi argued that contemporary Italian culture was influenced by the dual forces of modernism - which were found in 'the desire to live entirely in the present'; and primitivism - which was connected with 'the need to retrace the origins of the formative processes of our sensibility'. Although the assertion that modern architectural culture was tied to indigenous sources is contrary to the rhetoric of many of the polemicists of European modernism, scholars now argue that the rise of architectural modernity in Europe and the Americas was as closely tied to indigenous sources as it was to international currents.3 This was perhaps even more the case in Italy, where the work of some of the earliest proponents of modern architecture, such as Giulio Ulisse Arata, Ernesto Basile and Raimondo D'Aronco, was deeply rooted in Italy's strong regional traditions.