Italian Rationalism emerged in the late 1920s as Italy's contribution to the European Modern Movement — a synthesis of classical proportion, Mediterranean materiality, and Modernist spatial ideas. The Gruppo 7 architects and Giuseppe Terragni sought to reconcile Italian architectural tradition with the machine age.
Terragni's Casa del Fascio in Como (1936) is the movement's masterpiece: a perfect half-cube with a facade organised as a mathematical grid of solids and voids. Italian Rationalism differs from northern European Modernism in its heavier materiality — marble, travertine, and rendered masonry replace glass curtain walls — and its engagement with classical ideas of symmetry and proportion.
