the santa maria novella train station in florence
rectilinear and virile character of the great Italian tradition”7. A few years later in 1936, at the time of the Italian conquest of Ethiopia, Pacini was more precise in his commentary, claiming that the front of the building was not only proof of the existence of the “spirit of the Tuscan race”, but provided concrete evidence that such design had mastered the field of architecture [emphasis mine]8. Professionals praised the station. Yet it was highly controversial in the popular press. There were numerous cartoons that parodied the design. In one, the idea for the cascade of glass that unites the roof with the front façade was suggested to be spawned by the dam of the Arno located down river from the Ponte alla Carraia. The implication of such press was that the general public was not yet ready to appreciate the building’s modernist vernacular austerity. Such appreciation would come later, cultivated by an intricate re-patterning of consumption habits. Architects and critics who wrote about Italic vernacular architecture of the countryside during the 1930s often drew a comparison to contemporary design. When discussing the shared attribute of “functionalism”, some suggested that rural architecture was actually more “modern” than the work of leading modernist designers9. The so-called casa contadina or casa colonica (farmhouse), whether located in a rural hamlet or seen as an isolated farm house, was “an organism that underwent continuous transformation throughout time”, one critic claimed, conditioned by factors such as “climate, economy, and culture”10. It was argued that such flexibility in function and design was the very essence of avant-garde design. In 1934 the Florentine architect Alfredo Lensi made this explicit by renaming the humble country houses “Rationalist” in a provocative article published in L’Illustrazione Toscana”11. For Lensi, rural Tuscan architecture embodied the qualities outlined by Giuseppe Terragni and his colleagues in the Rationalist Manifesto of 1926 — it was pure, simple and logical, but above all it was flexible. Writing in Civiltà in 1942, a critic noted, that “the loggia, portico, and cortile of the rural house represented the honest naked communion between man and the countryside”12. Its architectural elements were aspects of “true simple beauty”. The critic borrowed heavily from Leonbattista Alberti to argue that the “pure modular forms” of rural housing “constitute an 7 Alberto Luchini, “Architettura Razionale. Italia Bella, Moderna, Italiana. Perche siamo per il progetto Michelucci”, L’Universale, March 10, 1933, p. 9. 8 Pacini, “La Stazione”, p. 148. 9 Bino Sanminiatelli “Case Coloniche in Toscana” Civiltà, January 21, 1942. 10 Antonio La Stella, “Architettura Rurale”, in Giuseppe Pagano Fotografo, Cesare de Seta editor, (Milan: Einaudi, 1971), p. 16. 11 Alfredo Lensi, “Razionalismo nelle vecchie costruzioni”, L’illustrazione toscana, January 1934, 26-28. 12 Sanminiatelli “Case Coloniche, p. 85.
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