The Radical Le Corbusier Design That Shaped Italy

Italy’s landscape is dotted with homes built in the image of the Maison Dom-Ino, Le Corbusier’s World War I-era blueprint for standardized housing.
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Some are not.Space Caviar

If you’ve spent any time in the Italian countryside, you’ve likely seen them: skeletal, concrete structures that consist of little more than a couple floors suspended by columns, connected by a single staircase. “It’s one of those things that makes up the Italian landscape today, on the tops of hills, by the beach, on the seaside,” says architect and writer Joseph Grima. “Some are in states of disrepair, and some are fully functional buildings.”

Le Corbusier, the famous Swiss-French architect and pioneer of modernism, didn’t design these structures, but they bear his fingerprints. Each is built in the image of the Maison Dom-Ino, his World War I-era blueprint for standardized housing. When Le Corbusier unveiled his drawing in 1914, he had an idea without a client. And while it never took off as he envisioned, it was adapted by a generation of Italian architects.

Grima, founder of the design group Space Caviar, grew up in Italy amidst these odd structures. Like skyscrapers in New York and Pizza Huts across America, they are steeped in design history but rarely noticed. When they are, it’s not always favorably: “It’s a design innovation that’s been turned into something, especially in Italy, that is regarded as something completely the opposite. It’s a form of architectural blasphemy. It became synonymous with an eyesore, and a dilapidated landscape,” Grima says.

There’s a strange contradiction here. Whether the locals like them or not, the Maison Dom-Ino structures are as much a part of Italian life as the Mediterranean climate, or the wine. Vasco Rossi, the “Italian Bruce Springsteen,” according to Grima, grew up in one. When an earthquake wrecked Sicily, many of the ensuing conversations circled around what happened to the stalwart Dom-Inos. The structures created what Grima calls “a stage for the theater of everyday life,”—one that’s featured in 99 Dom-Ino, a film series Grima created with Space Caviar.

Radical for Its Time

Le Corbusier, perhaps the most famous Modernist architect, first revealed a blueprint for the Maison Dom-Ino just over a century ago. It was a stark design of concrete slabs, columns, and a staircase. It was revolutionary in its simplicity.

The point of the Dom-Ino—the name is “domus” and “innovation” spliced together—was to reduce a housing structure to its most skeletal form, so inhabitants could decide for themselves where walls should go and how their lives would sprawl out inside. We’re familiar with this idea today, thanks to open plan offices and airy loft apartments. But in the past, homeowners didn’t have this freedom. “Earlier architects followed conventional room arrangements,” says Mary McLeod, a professor of architecture at Columbia University. Some of those architects also dabbled with reinforced concrete, but it was Le Corbusier who created a technology that buried steel beams within concrete slabs. This “pancake scheme,” McLeod says, “allows for what he called the plan libre, or free plan, where the walls can be placed anywhere. It allows for a new aesthetic possibility: walls that don’t come to ceilings, shaped rooms, a more fluid open space.”

The Maison Dom-Ino was a radical idea. Le Corbusier pursued patents for his beam-less building method, and published writings about the Dom-Ino system in the 1920s and the 1930s. The ideas didn’t go unnoticed by architects at the time—it was of particular interest to more avant garde builders, some of whom helped proliferate Dom-Ino-style reinforced concrete housing across Italy.

The Theater of Everyday Life

Grima and collaborator Martina Muzi found 140 Dom-Ino structures around Italy and filmed micro-documentaries about 99 of them, a few of which we’re able to show here. The narration is sparse, but the cinematography is jaw-dropping. Together, the 99 two- and three-minutes films create a composite portrait of the Dom-Ino’s legacy. Some, like Vasco Rossi’s old home, are well-known. Rossi doesn’t live there anymore, but fans make pilgrimages to the house, scrawling notes on the fence in spray paint, the same way people do at Jim Morrison’s grave in Paris. Visitors come just to take their photograph in front of house, unwittingly including Le Corbusier’s design idea in the backdrop of their photo albums.

In 2001, the entire nation saw another Dom-Ino appear again and again on television, when 16-year-old Erika La Nardo and her boyfriend were arrested in the grisly double murder of La Nardo’s mother and brother. The home loomed large during the investigation: It wasn’t just the scene of the stabbings, it was the backdrop for a Shakespearean family murder.

Grima says his aim was to “create a portrait of living in Italy,” and to show how the act of inhabiting these homes changed over the last 100 years. In southern Italy, Grima says, it’s common to see rebar columns sticking out on top of buildings. The columns mean additional floors can be quickly added later, as the family grows. Other times, the naked rebar is a foil against paying property taxes, since unfinished buildings are exempt. In Sicily, after the earthquake, Grima says, “the house became a pretext for understanding how people’s lives were affected.”

These stories suggest that even though the official design for the Dom-Ino was never realized, its creator’s wishes for the system came true. “Although Le Corbusier made his proposal for a very specific deployment of this technology, we are convinced he was just as interested in the ways that each individual creates their own form of architecture,” Grima says. Life spilled out in unexpected ways.