Palazzina Girasole, Rome, Luigi Moretti, 1950
Born in Rome in 1907, Luigi Moretti built consistently during both the Fascist period and the post war period of Italian reinvention. What is most extraordinary in buildings of the 1950s and 60s is his originality, a playful inventiveness that used the forms of modern architecture: but rather than copying them, which most of his contemporaries did, turned them into a language to be subverted and re-thought. In the Girasole flats in Rome, the apartment block (with strip windows and unadorned white walls) is raised above a rough and primitive base, with a narrow gash in the centre of its thin and separated facade, and is topped by an asymmetrical split pediment. Thus he created a kind of Mannerism in modern architecture, and indeed set the scene for the full-blown Postmodernism later developed by Robert Venturi, who acknowledged the inspiration of Moretti's design.
Via Corso Italia, Milan: Luigi Moretti 1957
In the mid 1950s Moretti designed a development of a small site in the commercial heart of Milan, with four separate blocks both commercial and residential. A slim wedge-shaped block juts over the street line, while each building is distinctly and expressively detailed in the modernist formal language. He showed this great ingenuity at a time when most other architects were designing dull copies of SOM's Lever House in New York in similar urban contexts !