GIUSEPPE PAGANO POGATSCHNIG
(1896-1945)
Pogatschnig was an Italian architect.
He was born in Parenzo (Poreĉ, 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 1920s, he started designing his first buildings, like
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 by the European
avant-gardes. He had a significant career as a writer and
defender of rationalist architecture in the presses,
especially Casabella, whose name he soon changed from La
Casa Bella when he became director of the magazine in 1933.
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, of
which he was in complete control. 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.
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 position in the Fascist party and prestige among
architects, as well as the diversity of cultural production
under Mussolini's Fascism, allowed him to openly critique
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 of 1943 and imprisoned at Brescia, and
escaped in July of 1944. He was recaptured in September of
1944 in Milan, imprisoned at Villa Triste, tortured, and
transferred to the prison of San Vittore, then to Bolzano
and then to Mauthausen, Melk and back to Mauthausen.
Pagano Pogatschnig died at the Mauthausen concentration
camp in Germany on the 22nd of April, 1945.
fonte: www.wikipedia.org
