Palazzo delle Esposizioni

Abstract

The lobby of the conference rooms; Two buildings of the late 1930s are considered to be Libera's masterpieces. One is the Villa Malaparte, built for Curzio Malaparte on the island of Capri in 1938, an enigmatic design of a block of a house-cum-stair. The second is the winning competition entry for the Palazzo de Ricevimenti e Congressi (Palazzo delle Esposizioni; 1937-1940) in the Città Giardino EUR outside Rome. This building is possibly the finest example of a great interior space in the architecture of 20th-century Italy and is considerably larger than Giuseppe Terragni's interior atrium in the Casa del Fascio (now Casa del Popolo) in Como. The building also portrays the problems of a Fascist and a Modernist architecture. The rear façade is composed of a great curtain wall, braced by elegant vertical bow-trusses, covered by a wide overhanging concrete slab, while at the front vaguely Doric columns support the slab, thus presenting a 'Roman' face to the city. Source: Grove Art Online; http://www.groveart.com/ (accessed 2/1/2008