Rasini House on the corner of Corso Venezia and Bastioni di Porta Venezia

Milan

Rasini

Emilio Lancia

After this project the two designers, Ponti and Lancia, split up. And there was already some distance between them in this building, made up of two distinct blocks: there is perhaps more of Lancia in the tower (except for the stepped terraces of the top floors, a typical Pontian solution) and more of Ponti in the cubic villa.Over the years this group of houses, as Ponti called it, has become a symbol of Milanese architecture in the thirties, almost a small piece of city in which the opposing tendencies of the time (the novecento and the razionale) were brought together. In these years the magazines carried pictures of the tower that conveyed a metaphysical image of the deserted architectural pergolas on the top floor (Savinio, 1944- up here there is an air of the gods); but Ponti wanted them populated in the Mediterranean fashion with awnings, parasols, trees, flowers, in short, happily lived in.