The limited attention paid by architectural historians to the influence of continental European migrant architects on Australian architecture has been noted in recent architecture literature. This study offers a close analysis of the life and work of Canberra architect Enrico Taglietti, who migrated to Australia from Italy in 1955. His work demonstrates a 'highly personal style' offering more depth and playfulness of form and content than the work of his contemporaries. Taglietti designed a broad range of private and public buildings in Canberra, his adopted 'invisible city', including Dickson District Library, Giralang Primary School and the War Memorial Repository, and received in 2007 the Royal Australian Institute of Architects (RAIA) Gold Medal. Yet, despite this success his work has received limited acknowledgment from Australian architectural historians. who show a persistent difficulty with integrating Taglietti's architectural language into prevailing architectural schema. This study adopts an integrated methodology offered by Manfredo Tafuri's 'operative criticism', micro-history and oral history to retrace the origin of Taglietti's 'idiosyncratic design', arguing that an understanding of Taglietti's formative experiences, his habitus (in the words of Pierre Bourdieu), can shed light on his architectural language. Taglietti inherited Bruno Zevi's, Carlo De Carli's and Frank L10yd Wright's belief in the architectural continuum space as the fundamental expression of the modernist period, Pier Luigi Nervi's notion of arte del costruire as the combination of technical as well as artistic knowledge, and the sense of craft as learnt from contact with the Finnish designer Tapio Wirkkala at the 1954 Milan Triennale. With an extraordinary attachment to Canberra, Taglietti developed an architectural language which responds to place, with its strong formalist extemal volumes juxtaposed to an idiosyncratic complex internal spatial arrangement. In questioning whether Taglietti shared common intellectual ground with Australian architects, and whether this common ground was Zevi's and Wright's view of architecture and urban design. this study argues that lan McKay (b.1932) is the Australian architect who shares common aspects with Taglietti, including ideas on the role of the architect as an urbanist.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/258636 |
| Date | January 2009 |
| Creators | Favaro, Paola, Built Environment, Faculty of Built Environment, UNSW |
| Publisher | Awarded by:University of New South Wales. Built Environment |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Copyright Favaro Paola., http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright |
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