History

By the early 1930s Giuseppe Terragni and Pietro Lingeri had become the most visible architects of the Italian Rationalist movement in Lombardia. Terragni was finishing the Casa del Fascio in Como, the building that would become the manifesto of the movement, while Lingeri was developing his own Milanese practice on the same theoretical ground. Cesare Toninello commissioned the pair in 1933 to design an income-producing apartment building on a small lot in the Isola neighbourhood, a working-class district just north of the Porta Garibaldi railway yards then in full residential expansion.

The choice of architects was unusual for an ordinary speculative commission. Rationalism in Italy was at the time mostly associated with civic and party buildings, and applying its language to a modest rental block was an experiment in extending the movement’s grammar to the everyday city. Toninello died in 1937, only two years after the building was completed, but the structure remained in family hands and continued to function as residential property throughout the post-war decades. Critical literature on Italian Rationalism has consistently treated Casa Toninello as one of the rare instances in which Terragni and Lingeri translated their formal vocabulary into a small-scale urban context.