Armando Brasini: The 'Trombone' of Italian Architecture Reconsidered

Luigi Prestinenza Puglisi re-evaluates Armando Brasini (died February 1965), an Italian architect often dismissed as a 'trombone' (windbag) of architecture. Despite his traditionalist style, Brasini was skilled in articulating volumes and masses, admired by modernists like Luigi Pellegrin and cited by Robert Venturi in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. Brasini's work, such as the building on Via IV Novembre in Rome, demonstrates a mastery of plastic masses and urban scale, contrasting with the Milanese school's focus on lightness and modularity. Puglisi argues that Brasini's architecture, while not modern in style, followed its own principles of composition. Brasini also voted for Giovanni Michelucci's winning design for Florence's Santa Maria Novella station in 1932. Carlo Belli noted Brasini was the least intransigent of the regime's three untouchable architects (with Cesare Bazzani and Marcello Piacentini).