A palace for a Baroque Urbanist/ The rhythm of Sant’Ambrogio Casa Caccia Dominioni and Architecture as a Continuum

Abstract

In 1947, in the wake of the city council's postwar reconstruction scheme, architect Luigi Caccia Dominioni took it upon himself to give new life to the bombed remains of his family palace on Piazza Sant’Ambrogio in Milan. This article aims to explore the approach to architecture in Milan during the post-war reconstruction period through an examination of the concepts of temporality, tradition, and the specific case of Casa Caccia Dominioni. The building is to be read both as a model to deal with modernity within history and context, and as a foundational work for the development of Caccia Dominioni’s language, popularised by Gio Ponti as “Stile di Caccia.” The work questions the specific relevance of this work by Caccia in light of his subsequent production and following Agnoldomenico Pica’s claim that it represented the synthesis of what postwar restoration ought to be. These statements are explored through critical work produced following the “rediscovery” of Caccia’s work at the beginning of the 21st century, along with archival material, direct observation, and visual documentation. The research is centred on an architectural reading of the palace and an intention to dissect the way Caccia makes use of ‘memory’ in his work, counterposed to the theoretical reading given by Ponti to concepts of tradition and reconstruction. The archival and literary research is integrated with individual interviews with architects and scholars Cino Zucchi and Simona Orsina Pierini.