Identity and Historicism in the Messina Experience: the Mannerist Period of Ernesto Basile

Abstract

After the earthquake of 1908, Messina became the scene of architectural, urban planning and technological experimentation where it was necessary to intervene to reconstruct the image of a city which had almost totally been erased. The city would become a theatre for the achievements of some of the most influential architects of the age who, through their works, tried to give a new identity to an urban reality that had lost its roots. Among these we find the work of Ernesto Basile the Cassa di Risparmio project, the reorganization projects for Piazza Garibaldi and Piazza del Popolo, and the War Memorial. With these projects, he seemed to be orienting his architectural language toward a new phase. In Messina, Ernesto Basile, approached the most mature phase of his architectural production where he enacted a vitalist revision of modernism, codifying his architecture in a classic way through a stylization of rational forms that became key to interpreting the architectural orders, in search of that modern order to which he aspired during his prolific design activity. In Messina, he put into practice the principles of this rethinking. His productions were the result of those paradigms of modernist language, including references to his own most important architectural work, which was very far from the new academic approach and the mainstream architectural style of the twentieth century.