Giuseppe Pagano

Giuseppe Pagano (1896 – April 22, 1945) was an Italian architect, notable for his involvement in the movement of rationalist architecture in Italy up to the end of the Second World War.

Giuseppe Pogatschnig was born in Parenzo (Poreč, then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now part of Croatia). After attending the Italian language Lyceum in Trieste, he fled to join the Italian army at the onset of the First World War, adopting the Italian translation of his name, Pagano. He was twice wounded and twice captured. In the years immediately following the war, Pagano was associated with Nationalist and pre-Fascist politics, and would be among the founders of the first fascist party of his hometown of Parenzo. In 1924, Pagano graduated from the Politecnico of Turin, with a degree in architecture. In the late 1920s, he started designing his first buildings, including the Gualino office building in Turin (1928), and working on exhibitions in Turin and soon in Milan. In 1931, he moved to Milan to work for the architecture magazine La Casa Bella.

From the late 1920s, Pagano had adopted a rationalist position, influenced by Futurism and the European avant-gardes. He had a significant career as a writer and defender of rationalist architecture in the press, especially Casabella, whose name he soon changed from La Casa Bella when he became director of the magazine in 1933 along with Edoardo Persico. He was involved in the V Triennale of Milan in 1933, in which he collaborated in the design of the House with a Steel Structure, the 1934 Aeronautics Show, which he was responsible for designing, and the VI Triennale of 1936, which he directed together with the painter Mario Sironi. All three expositions were held in architect Giovanni Muzio's Palazzo dell'Arte in the Parco Sempione, which had been built for the V Triennale, the first held in Milan. He was also an accomplished photographer and he often published his own photographs in Casabella using them to strengthen his critiques of the architecture of the time.

Though initially an active member of the Italian Fascist party, from the mid-1930s, Pagano's architectural philosophy led him farther and farther from the official architects of the Fascist regime, such that his VI Triennale, in effect, proposed an alternate architectural expression for Fascism. His most significant contributions were: an extension to the Palazzo dell'Arte designed for the 1933 Triennale by Milanese Novecento architect Giovanni Muzio, the Exhibition of Vernacular Architecture (with Guarniero Daniel) and Exhibition of Building Materials (with Guido Frette). Pagano opposed "representative architecture" of all types, whether Modern or Classical. He remained dubious of some groups of Rationalists (like the Gruppo 7 and art critics like Pier Maria Bardi) who made attempts to identify their architecture with Italian Fascism, and to make it the official state architecture. In 1937 we worked closely with regime architect Marcello Piacentini on the interiors of the Italian Pavilion for the Paris International Expo and also worked on the master plan for the ill-fated Rome Expo of 1942, that was never held.

Pagano's position in the Fascist party and prestige among architects, as well as the diversity of cultural production under Benito Mussolini's Fascism, allowed him to openly criticize some of the regime's constructions as "bombastically rhetorical", from the pages of Casabella. In 1942, Pagano would leave the Scuola di Mistica and the Fascist Party. In 1943 he made contacts with members of the resistance, was captured in November 1943 and imprisoned at Brescia, from where he escaped in July 1944. He was recaptured in September 1944 in Milan, imprisoned at Villa Triste, and tortured. Later he was transferred to the prison of San Vittore, then to Bolzano and then to Mauthausen, Melk, and back again to Mauthausen.

Pagano died at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria on 22 April 1945.