OASE92

In this article Dirk Somers addresses the work of Italian architects Mario Asnago and Claudio Vender. Somers states that the unrestrained combination of style elements provides their designs with a complexity and depth that is formally totally different yet compositionally similar to that of the accumulations of classical elements in the street façades Muzio, Ponti and De Finetti created before the war. Asnago and Vender exchange the classical vocabulary for contemporary looks, but stick to the grammar of classical composition. Plinth and superstructure, loggias, porte-cocheres, porticos, figuratively different window openings, different scales and mannerist dissonances are all part of their façade compositions. Somers argues that their unrestrained appropriation of the post-war vocabulary helps Asnago and Vender to strip design of its polemical character and thus bring it into the domain of the commonplace.