In 1927 the Società Novocomum, a property company from Olgiate Comasco, commissioned a young and almost unknown architect to design a speculative apartment block on Viale Sinigaglia, between the city centre and Como’s lakefront stadium. Giuseppe Terragni was twenty-three. The drawings he submitted to the building authority showed a sober, vaguely neoclassical facade of the kind the commission expected, and on that basis the permit was granted. What rose behind the scaffolding over the next two years was something else entirely.

When the hoardings came down in 1929, Como saw a five-storey block whose corners had been carved away and replaced with cylindrical bodies entirely in glass, the wall seeming to peel back to reveal a drum of light at each angle. The horizontal banding, the ribbon windows and the floating corners owed an open debt to the European avant-garde — and to nothing in the local tradition. Scandal followed at once: Terragni had effectively built one design while approving another, and the municipality summoned an expert commission, chaired by the Milanese architect Piero Portaluppi, to decide whether the building damaged the decorum of the city.

The commission ruled that it did not, and the Novocomum stood. The verdict mattered well beyond Como. In 1930 the critic and architect Giuseppe Pagano reviewed the building enthusiastically in La Casa Bella, and the Novocomum became a manifesto in built form — proof that an Italian modern architecture was not only possible but already standing. Terragni would go on to the Casa del Fascio a few hundred metres away, but it was here, on a quiet residential avenue, that Razionalismo first declared itself in Italy. The building remains private apartments, lived in much as it was designed.