L'ideale di una casa capanna

A multifaceted figure, Ico Parisi was an architect, designer, photographer, and thinker. He summarises a making performance typical of post-war Italian modernity in Como, one of the centers of the artistic and cultural debate in those years. Together with his wife Luisa, he founded “La Ruota studio” in 1948, where they developed an idea of living that combined art with a taste for the home and domesticity. The project for Casa De Toma (1957) is part of the atmosphere of a rethinking of living discussed in the main architecture magazines such as Domus and Casabella and it represents the transition from the plastic language of the architect’s early works to the organicist and regionalist tendencies of the post-war period. Parisi suggests an archetypal solution, a hut house, where the roof is the formal matrix that brings together all the interior and exterior spaces. The fence is located below the coverture and is characterized by a rectangular shape, where the distinction between living and sleeping areas is obtained through two different heights. The house evokes the use of certain formal and aesthetic choices that represent his conception of living such as the presence of the roof that defines the enclosure of the house, the relationship with the natural context, the use of local materials associated with a modern interpretation of objects.