"Above the olives the woods began. The pines must once have reigned over all the region, because they still infiltrated the slopes, in slivers and clumps, down to the shore of the sea, as did the larches. The oaks were denser and thicker than they seem today, because they were the first and most prized victims of the ax. Higher up, the pines gave way to chestnuts, the woods went up the mountain, and no limits could be seen. This was the universe of sap in which we lived, we the inhabitants of Ombrosa, almost without noticing it."

When was ‘once’?

"The pines must once have reigned over all the region."1 In The Baron in the Trees, Italo Calvino (1923–1985) tells the story of Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò, who at the age of twelve decides to live up in the trees and indeed never again sets foot on the ground. Calvino wrote it in the middle of the twentieth century but set it in the eighteenth, and he registers the change from its former condition at the beginning of the nineteenth century, at the end of the life of the protagonist and of his brother, who narrates the tale: ‘The sky is empty, and our eyes ached at the sight of it, we old Ombrosans who were used to living beneath those green domes. It almost seems as if the trees could not hold out once my brother had left them, or as if people had been seized by a frenzy of the axe.’

The Ligurian coast, with the shady Ombrosa and the exotically planted Ondariva of Calvino’s tale, is said to have been so densely wooded in the eighteenth century that one could cross the whole region through the trees without ever touching the ground. But when, at the end of the novel, in the early nineteenth century, the narrator — Cosimo’s brother Biagio — looks out over a bare landscape, the trees felled and the sky empty, Calvino is in fact describing a condition that was taking hold in his own time.

For the real destruction of nature in the Mediterranean came after the war — and beside what followed, the felling of trees out of severe material need during the war had done only short-lived damage. With the economic boom, the miracolo economico, after the privations of the war and its aftermath, with new social legislation and the general availability of air travel and the motor car, mass tourism appeared as a phenomenon for the first time. In the building boom that followed, holiday homes and tourist blocks went up, above all in the coastal towns and on the beaches of the Mediterranean — enormous in scale, utterly banal, and in a monotonous form that ignored their sites and disfigured whole landscapes and coastlines. Yet just as Calvino’s novel about the fictional Ombrosa on the Ligurian coast appeared — in 1957, at the height of this new age of travel — a remarkable exception within the spectrum of ‘holiday architecture’ was taking shape on that same coast, west of Genoa: the Pineta (literally ‘pinewood’) di Arenzano on the Punta San Martino.

Marquise Giustiniani Negrotto Cambasio

At Arenzano, on the Riviera di Ponente, the ranges of the Ligurian Apennines come within a few kilometres of the sea. In his Reisebilder (Travel Pictures), published in 1828, Heinrich Heine describes the ‘sublime prospect, when one comes down from the heights of the Apennines and sees far below the blue sea stretching away into infinity, while the mountains stride like giants into the water.’2

Until well into the nineteenth century, the town of Arenzano, where ‘the mountains stride like giants into the water’,3 was shaped by fishing and farming; there was shipbuilding, a little industry, a little tourism, and just under four thousand inhabitants. By 1872 at the latest, when the railway from Genoa to Ventimiglia, with a station at Arenzano, was completed, tourism had become markedly more important to the town. Sea, sun and good air made the Ligurian coast an attractive destination for growing numbers of people in search of health and rest, from Genoa, Milan and all over Europe. And from 1913, those not staying in private villas could be put up at the Grand Hotel Arenzano, owned by the Cattaneo Adorno Giustiniani family. The imposing four-storey building, almost a hundred metres long and punctuated by three tower-like raised sections, dominates the coastal road and its promenade, where at that time the ferrovia litoranea still cut the town off from the sea. Only in 1968 was the line moved away from the coast; since then, it has run inland, alongside the motorway completed in 1954.

The most impressive building in Arenzano, however, is a private house — and it matters to this story not least because the impetus for the Pineta came from its later owner. This is the Villa Negrotto Cambiaso, a sixteenth-century villa remodelled in the nineteenth century, standing slightly raised in the middle of a large park. In the mid-sixteenth century the merchant Tobia Pallavicino acquired a medieval tower here together with a large estate, and had a villa built that served him as a summer residence — in Genoa he lived in a magnificent palazzo on the Strade Nuove. The surrounding land was mostly farmed. More than three hundred years later, around 1880, his successor the Marchesa Luisa Sauli Pallavicino had the villa remodelled to designs by the architect Luigi Rovelli, and a park laid out in place of the fields. Rovelli already had some experience of remodelling villas and gardens, both in Arenzano itself and in and around Genoa. He enlarged the house and gave it a palatial character, raised the tower and decorated the building in a medieval spirit with arcading and battlements. The park he furnished with artificial pools, streams, a waterfall and partly exotic planting — shades of Calvino’s Ondariva.

In 1925 the Marchesa Matilde Giustiniani Negrotto Cambiaso became the owner of the villa and the park, as well as some 150 hectares of farmland and woodland to the south and south-west: the Punta San Martino, later the Pineta di Arenzano. The estate had passed to her on the death of her second husband, the Marchese Pierino Negrotto Cambiaso, sometime mayor of Arenzano and heir to the Sauli Pallavicino family.

Given the architecture of her immediate surroundings — the Marchesa lived in a neo-Gothic, that is to say historicist, house, and as late as the 1930s had a greenhouse built to resemble a large nineteenth-century garden pavilion — the decision she took in the mid-1950s together with Marcello Cattaneo Adorno, son of her niece, adopted daughter and heir Carlotta,4 is astonishing. For the Punta San Martino they commissioned a masterplan from two Milanese architects from whom they could expect an unreservedly contemporary proposal: Ignazio Gardella and Marco Zanuso.

Pineta di Arenzano

On these 150 hectares of farmland and woodland a settlement of holiday housing was to be built that would include, besides houses and apartment buildings, a hotel, a village square with shops, and sports and leisure facilities — a certain functional autonomy, in other words. There were few planning restrictions or other legal requirements on the site. Even so, the clients set high standards for the buildings and infrastructure on their private land: in so valuable a location, everything was to be integrated with care for the environment, to remain subordinate, to preserve the value of nature rather than dominate it. The exceptional setting and the involvement of the region’s leading contemporary architects were meant to guarantee a certain exclusivity and to promote tourism in Arenzano.

For the purposes of this project — above all, the provision of access, the division into plots and the urbanisation of the site — the Giustiniani Negrotto Cambiaso and Cattaneo Adorno families, together with investors, chief among them the Milanese financier and building contractor Ambrogio Gadola, founded the company Cemadis (Centri Marittimi di Soggiorno),5 with Gadola as its president. Why the commission for the masterplan went in 1956 to Ignazio Gardella and Marco Zanuso remains an open question: neither of these two architect-designers was really familiar with, or experienced in, urban design, settlement planning or landscape planning. What characterised them both, and the post-war generation of Italian architects as a whole, was a quite different scale: as a rule, they worked across architecture, furniture and product design and interiors, in close collaboration with furniture manufacturers.

The governing principle of the plan was a clear zoning into existing, protected vegetation on the one hand and possible building zones on the other. Along the Via Aurelia, following the upper contour at around 70 metres above sea level, the existing pinewoods and olive groves were placed under protection and the main access routes were laid down. For the zones set aside for building, functions and guidelines were formulated, but room for manoeuvre was left in execution and detail; the individual buildings and paths were to develop gradually, taking their cue from the character of the landscape, the ground conditions, the vegetation and the views. The plots with sea views were accordingly divided more finely, those further back more generously and with greater integration into the landscape, while those higher still, along the Via Aurelia, were reserved for larger condominiums and permanent residences.

In the first phase, from 1957, the eastern part of the Pineta near the harbour was developed: the Albergo San Martino by Ignazio Gardella and Marco Zanuso, the village square with the buildings around it, and the first holiday houses, among them one by Gio Ponti. In 1959 the golf course, with a swimming pool, tennis courts and riding facilities, opened on the plateau, followed in 1964 by the church designed by Luigi Caccia Dominioni. In the 1960s development moved further west, as far as Vico Magistretti’s vast Marina Grande complex. Cemadis became the central institution of the development. It established a building commission that assessed the massing, the materials and the compatibility with the landscape of projects proposed by private clients. Together with local firms, it also acted as developer, building houses that were sold on completion. A further review was carried out by the heritage authorities and the fire service of the municipality of Arenzano. The settlement thus grew within a framework that was comparatively free yet controlled — underwritten by the protection of the landscape, the oversight of Cemadis, and the commitment to landscape integration set out at the beginning by the landowners and clients, the Giustiniani Negrotto Cambiaso and Cattaneo Adorno families.

Over the twenty or so years of development that followed, however, this gentle form of private regulation, with little municipal influence, did not produce only outstanding results — in the end, it too was part of a form of touristic colonisation of the coast, in which a landscape was built over for the holidays and leisure of a privileged few. By the time a generally binding development plan was adopted for the region in 1976, the settlement was already complete, and alongside a dozen or so houses of high architectural quality, most of what had been built was very ordinary. Above all, the commitment to protecting the coast, the landscape and the vegetation was not honoured everywhere; along the shore there are, in places, dense concentrations of building and, here and there, buildings of disconcerting size. Among them is Vico Magistretti’s Marina Grande, whose megastructure, measured against the founding idea of the Pineta, looks like one gigantic mistake. Magistretti covered the railway running along the shore for a length of 350 metres and made it the base for a terrace and promenade of enormous proportions, high above the beach. Behind it, above a large half-open garage, rise a U-shaped building with shops and apartments and two long terraced apartment wings. From the promenade platform one reaches the beach by a lift and a few flights of stairs that stand like concrete sculptures set against the view. In 1968, only four years after completion, the railway — the very linchpin of the megastructure — was moved inland, which made the constructed barrier to the beach absurd (even if the tunnel has since served as a footpath and cycle path). And because the U-shaped main building opens not towards the sea but northwards to the rising slope, the square it creates was charmless from the start.6 So, the great form of the Marina Grande, perhaps intended as a culmination, is in every respect the antithesis of the Pineta’s architectural overture, the Albergo San Martino with the Marina Piccola: the one carefully woven into the landscape, touching the beach at a single point; the other a volume of incomprehensible size that turns a long stretch of coastline into a built statement.

The initial idea of combining plots into larger units without walls or fences, so leaving the landscape permeable, was likewise realised only by Luigi Caccia Dominioni, in the group of houses for his friends and family. Most houses, including the architecturally outstanding ones, open inwards or towards the sea, but not towards the public space of the street. Here isolation prevails; most houses remain all but invisible behind walls and dense vegetation. Nor is the relationship with the Pineta’s real attraction, the sea, ever direct. It remains a matter of views; access is limited and possible only at certain places.

And yet: the particular architectural quality of the houses and the care taken to preserve and spare the landscape make the Pineta di Arenzano (despite all the above criticisms) an exception within the spectrum of holiday or summer-house architecture. The buildings seek a foothold in the terrain but do not dominate the landscape. The topography of the slope is developed into differentiated volumes and stepped spatial forms. Not only are new architectural solutions sought for the connection between inside and outside — typical enough in a holiday house — but living in a holiday house is redefined altogether: the material, chromatic and pictorial particularities of the place find their way into the architectural language, landscape and building are in harmony, the family’s living space is extended, and being together is placed at the centre. Unlike the house in the city, the summer house is not home. It is not about rootedness or permanence; here one’s stay is fleeting, the relationship between people and place seasonal and provisional. The most successful holiday houses give expression to this particular way of living, in the knowledge that the time there is limited, that summer will end. In their layout, in the way they concentrate the views, in their emphasis on family life together, the finest summer houses of the Pineta are instruments for perceiving nature, amplifiers of the atmosphere of sun, wind, pines and sea.

What is modern?

In 1958, two years after the masterplan was approved and with construction still in full swing, the Pineta di Arenzano was presented in Domus, at that time edited by Gio Ponti, and honoured in the following years with further articles in the same magazine on individual buildings. When the eleventh CIAM congress — the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne — was held at Otterlo in the Netherlands in 1959, the Italian delegation presented, among other things, Vico Magistretti’s Casa Arosio in the Pineta di Arenzano. In its own way the small house was as much the expression of a new attitude and movement within the association as were the other Italian projects shown alongside it: the Torre Velasca in Milan by BBPR with Ernesto Nathan Rogers, social housing in Matera by Giancarlo De Carlo, and a workers’ canteen for the typewriter manufacturer Olivetti at Ivrea by Ignazio Gardella.

These four buildings had nothing to do with the architectural and urban dogmas of the Athens Charter — which Le Corbusier and his fellow campaigners had declared binding principle at the fourth CIAM in 1933, and which were still held high — nor with the view, postulated by the International Style, that architecture should be regular, modular and free of national, regional and local forms of expression and of ornament. Underlying all four was an entirely different idea: a specific relationship to place, an orientation towards local building forms, techniques and materials, an integration into the given conditions of a particular city or a particular landscape — in short, a critical revision of modernism in its relationship to history, tradition and context.

And although a change of generation had long since taken place within CIAM, and the Otterlo meeting was organised by the younger members of the so-called Team 10, the debate itself remained in the grip of dogma. The Italian projects were not only discussed controversially but also harshly criticised: tolerance of other concepts, ideas and positions apparently still counting not as a virtue but as an intellectual weakness. For Alison and Peter Smithson, Aldo van Eyck, Georges Candilis and others, the designs were neither radical nor modern enough. They were, it was said, formalist, historicist, neo-rationalist, neo-realist and backward-looking. To be radically modern meant being structuralist in conception and building in the standardised, industrial grid-based construction of the day. Regardless of the criticism of the Italian designs, and probably rather in the full awareness that architecture would never again have a single direction, the meeting at Otterlo in 1959 marked the end of CIAM. The association never met again.

Ernesto Nathan Rogers, however, is an important figure in the reception of the Pineta di Arenzano. With his 1955 essay Le preesistenze ambientali e i temi pratici contemporanei (The Pre-existing Environment and the Practical Tasks of Today) he provided something like its theoretical foundation, and his championing of the Casa Arosio at CIAM and in Casabella-Continuità shows that he saw in it a convincing architectural translation and built manifestation of his theory. For Rogers, the preesistenze ambientali — the pre-existing conditions of a place, both landscape and built — were the key to the new. The new is then a response to the place and its history that has to be negotiated afresh each time, caso per caso, developed as continuity with the existing context rather than as rupture, and as a specific response that follows no abstract, universal canon of form.7

The opening move in building the Pineta di Arenzano was the hotel designed by Ignazio Gardella and Marco Zanuso on the tip of Capo San Martino. From up here one can see 27 kilometres across the sea, past Arenzano to the port of Genoa. During the war, the strategically placed headland had served as a military base for coastal guns, and the architects incorporated the remains of these installations into the hotel’s plinth and pool area.

With some fifteen rooms at first, a restaurant, a bar, two swimming pools and large terraces, the Albergo San Martino sits very harmoniously in the landscape despite its size. From close up, the volumes of which it is composed, shifted alongside and placed on top of one another, read like a village; from a distance, the crenellated parapets of the roof terraces make it look like a modern castle. The silhouette may well have pleased the client, the Marchesa Matilde Giustiniani Negrotto Cambiaso, who could see Capo San Martino from her own crenellated neo-Gothic villa. Unlike at her home, however, the vernacular element here takes on an abstract, reduced form and a novel function: the alternation of solid lengths of parapet and wide gaps turns the view from the terrace into the landscape into a view through a window.

Because of the topography, the hotel’s levels are differentiated and cannot be clearly separated from one another. In the lower part, the bedrooms fan out into four groups, all facing the landscape and each with its own loggia or terrace. The entrance, with reception and a restaurant, lies above, and at the very top, where the restaurant has a second level, is the terrace, divided into several levels and zones, with a 30-metre linear pool along with a round pool, a nightclub, pavilions for shade and a sculptural concrete diving tower.

In keeping with local tradition, the pyramidal roofs of the buildings and pavilions are covered in Ligurian slate and the walls in pink render. The segmental arches of the loggias and the white pilaster strips and corner accents that reinforce the castle-like character also look decidedly traditional. But the character of the whole is defined far more by the broad plane of the geometrically ordered roof terrace with its modern pools, its tower and its airy pavilions, and by the furnishing of every room with furniture and fabrics designed by Marco Zanuso, Ignazio Gardella, Vico Magistretti and Luigi Caccia Dominioni. These forms and colours create a shimmering holiday mood that is entirely of its moment.

From the outset, the Albergo San Martino was linked to the Marina Piccola promenade, some 50 metres below, by a steep inclined lift. Its upper station sits above the large pool. At first the railway from Genoa to Ventimiglia still ran along the coast here, but in 1965 it was moved inland.

In parallel with the Albergo San Martino, Ignazio Gardella was also working on the Pineta’s central village square, with shops, a bar, a restaurant and apartments. Gardella designed a rectangular square formed by four buildings, three of them two storeys high with hipped roofs, one single-storey with a flat roof that could be walked on. Each has a single-storey arcade set into it, open to the square. The building on the south-west side, however, was never built, so that the almost-enclosed space Gardella conceived — at two of the corners the buildings were not to meet, keeping open sightlines to the coast and the harbour — has to be imagined.

The paved square is entered through the slightly detached building to the south-east; the open passage at its centre is continued on the opposite side of the square by a straight single-flight stair leading up to the roof terrace of the single-storey building. Belonging to this ensemble, in the northern corner of the square, is a restaurant with a bar on the ground floor, both designed by Gardella down to the details and furniture. The arcade running round the square, of piers and shallow arches of varying span, shades the shops behind it. The five apartments on the upper floor have windows of different sizes with shutters towards the square, and loggias towards the landscape.

Like Gardella’s first public building, the hotel, the buildings around the square are rendered in pink. Here he set the pale render against a terse, graphic outlining of the plinths, pier edges, sills and arch surrounds in dark slate, which gives the square a slightly surreal air, heightened by a row of slender, exceptionally tall lamps.

In 1959 Gardella also built four apartment buildings – so-called condomini – in the Pineta, south of the square, and in the same year his own house, the Casa Gardella. In 1960 the Villa De Negri was completed to his design, and in 1961, with Anna Castelli Ferrieri, the terraced Villa Gatta, set into the slope, and the similarly conceived Villa Castelli. His last house in the Pineta was the Casa Silvio Coggi of 1971, for the former president of the Milan Trade Fair.

Not far from the Pineta’s social meeting place, the village square, a spiritual place of assembly was built a few years later to designs by Luigi Caccia Dominioni: the church of San Martino. The task of building a church was not entirely new to him, but here, as before, he approached it in anything but a conventional way. The small church is a single-storey structure, with a non-directional altar area at its centre, held between two slender wings set at right angles to one another. The ‘nave’ to the east is an interior; the one to the west is a covered outdoor space; and the cobbled paving of the forecourt runs almost without a threshold into the interior and on into the altar area. Rendered in pink, with slate roofs and slim, spare window openings, the building is, for all its special purpose and significance within the Pineta, as unassuming as it could be, and has a profane quality in a liberated sense.

The unpretentious reticence of the church contrasts with what is probably the most eccentric house in the Pineta, which Caccia Dominioni had built in the preceding years as part of a group of single-family houses for various family members and friends. In this four-storey tower with a square plan, the apartments are reached independently of one another by external stairs. The account of how the house is organised and how it works is as vivid and expressive as it is poetic. And, as already mentioned, Caccia Dominioni was the only one here to realise a site concept of openness and permeability that was originally meant to be found in the whole settlement. The group of houses, encircled by the Via della Rotonda like an irregular round village, is recognisably the work of a single hand, yet consists of very different volumes — tall and tower-like, single-storey, paired, clustered — with a clear allocation of entrances and garden areas, but without any fences, walls or other boundaries.8

After working with Ignazio Gardella on the hotel, Marco Zanuso built a handful of single-family houses in the Pineta during the 1960s, in which he varied above all two themes and spatial forms: the patio, and the passage as caruggio, the narrow Ligurian alley. In the single-storey, introverted Casa Cattania the courtyard is enclosed on all sides; in the terraced Casa Valle the patio, open to the sea, is framed by carefully built curving walls; and in the Case Rosse — two strongly differentiated, red-rendered volumes standing close together — the passage takes on an almost urban character.

In the Casa Leto di Priolo, Zanuso combined the narrow passage and the patio — here enclosed on three sides — with a complex, terraced sequence of interior spaces and an exterior that is at once idiosyncratically hard and also attuned to the landscape. On the street side to the west is a single-storey volume. Closed walls clad in split grey stone slabs laid in horizontal courses predominate; the window lintels are forceful horizontals, emphatically white-rendered, crisply outlined beams; the window reveals are splayed like funnels. A gap only 1.20 metres wide between the volumes forms the entrance alley. Along the curved wall of the children’s playroom, steps lead down to the main floor with its central patio and a terrace cantilevered towards the sea — a terrace with no contact with the ground, since the steep slope leaves room for a lower floor beneath. Only the section makes the spatial arrangement intelligible: the difference in height between the highest point of the entrance front to the west and the lowest point to the north-east is 8.50 metres, and inside the house it is divided into a series of steps rather than distinct storeys. Stairs and steps abound, allowing family, guests and staff to move through the house independently. At the same time, the changes of level form three groups of rooms: to the west, the staff quarters above a garage; to the north and east, the differentiated living area with a music room and a gallery looking down into the double-height dining room; and to the south, a wing with the children’s playroom already mentioned, a library and guest rooms. The family bedrooms face east and lie beneath the bridge-like terrace. The garage, staff entrance and the kitchen are located to the north.

The spatial dramaturgy of narrow entry, sheltered patio and terrace projecting towards the sea is impressive. And in the archaic, strongly sculptural form of the house — with its irregularly placed doors and windows of different sizes, its incisions and protrusions — the interior arrangement becomes legible, without being entirely spelled out. The house even stands up to the theoretical test of a change of scale: superimpose this holiday house of modest dimensions onto a public building in the manner of Kahn, and the result is entirely convincing. 

This single-storey Casa Ercole lies at the heart of the settlement and unusually for a house in the Pineta — has no view of the sea. The irregularly shaped, elongated volume fills almost the full length of the plot, leaving a narrow forecourt with entrance and garage to the north and a small garden to the south.

The very shallow roof seems barely to rest on the walls, leaving a gap with clerestory lights above the external wall. To the south it projects slightly, shading small, covered terraces in front of the living room and bedrooms, whose dividing walls continue beyond the external wall. The central living room runs through the full depth of the house, is generously glazed and has the greatest ceiling height, while the private sleeping quarters to the west are smaller in scale and more intimate, and the service area by the kitchen to the east, with its own entrance and walled service yard, can also function on its own.

Throughout the house the floor is laid uniformly and continuously with ceramic tiles striped diagonally in blue, azure and white. Outside, it is finished in coarse-grained white render, with the windows and doors framed in blue-glazed ceramic pebbles. Here, in miniature, Ponti seems to be testing ideas for the Hotel Parco dei Principi in Sorrento, which was being planned at the same time. There, where he designed literally every piece of furniture and every detail in blue and white himself, and the sea really did lie at his feet, he could draw on lavish means. Here, with few means, he achieved a Ligurian-Mediterranean miniature.

At the same time as the Casa Ercole, Gio Ponti, together with his partners Alberto Rosselli and Antonio Fornaroli, built the Condominio Costa del Tesoro apartment complex in the Pineta. Its five five-storey buildings stand wall to wall on the steep slope very close to the sea — precisely where no building on this scale was originally to be permitted.

Vico Magistretti built two holiday houses in the Pineta in which he radicalised the idea of integration into the landscape in a way that was new at the time: he turned the houses’ flat roofs into accessible roof gardens. The Casa Arosio was the first single-family house in the settlement, and Magistretti followed through consistently on the masterplan’s idea of respect for the landscape, allowing the highly articulated volumes to follow the lie of the land and lifting the greenery sacrificed to the footprint up onto the roof by way of compensation.

The entrance, in a sheltered recess to the north-east, leads straight into the living area a few steps lower down. To the north-west on the entrance level is the volume containing the bedrooms, and towards the south-east the lowest volume, with the kitchen and the service and staff area. Above, and highest of all, is the transverse block with the children’s rooms. The interior is articulated mainly by steps and hardly at all by walls, so that the space flows continuously. The furniture and fittings are likewise by Magistretti.

The four volumes at different levels produce a correspondingly stepped roofscape, which can be reached from the top floor or directly from the garden by a stair. They are rendered in white with an admixture of powdered glass, so that the surfaces have a slight sheen and reflect the light. The wood of the tall, slender windows and shutters is white too, while the horizontal surfaces are laid with dark slate. As with several other holiday houses in the Pineta, the landscape design, which aimed at a unity of house and garden, was by Elena Balsari Berrone.

In 1964 Magistretti built a further house with an accessible roof garden for the Gardella family, again made in collaboration with Elena Balsari Berrone. But it was the Casa Arosio with which Vico Magistretti caused an immediate stir. At the CIAM congress in September 1959 it was fiercely criticised: too much in thrall to local building methods — shutters! — to tradition and to the particular landscape. In December of the same year, however, Ernesto Nathan Rogers, as editor of Casabella-Continuità, pointedly put the house on the front cover of the magazine.

With thanks to Valter Scelci and Christiano Lepratti, and to their colleagues at the University of Genoa, among them Elisabetta Canepa, Giovanni Carli, Giovanni Galli and Beatrice Moretti, for drawing attention to the Pineta di Arenzano in the course of an international symposium and workshop with Hochschule Bremen and FAU Lisboa in the summer of 2026.

Literature:

• Barisone S., Fochessati M., Franzone G., Canziani A.: Architetture in Liguria dagli anni Venti agli anni Cinquanta, Mailand 2004.
• Casamonti M. (Hg.): Ignazio Gardella, architetto: Costruire le modernità, Mailand 2006.
• De Giorgi M. (Hg.): Marco Zanuso, Mailand 1999.
• Franzone M., Patrone G.: La pineta di Arenzano. Architettura e paesaggio. Storia di un'utopia mancata, Mailand 2010.
• Gavazzi, Alberto, Luigi Caccia Dominioni: spazio sacro e architettura, Bologne 2015.
• Irace F., Marini P.: Luigi Caccia Dominioni. Stile di Caccia: case e cose da abitare, Venedig 2002.
• Irace F., Pasca V.: Vico Magistretti. Architetto e designer, Mailand 1999.
• Monestiroli A.: Ignazio Gardella, Mailand 2009.
• Ponti L. L.: Gio Ponti. L'opera, Mailand 1990.

• Casabella Continuità 234, 12/1959
• Domus 344, Juli 1958
• Domus 363, 02/1960
• Domus 369, 08/1960
• Domus 392, 07/1962
• Domus 395, 10/1962
• Domus 439, 06/1966