Terragni built almost everything he built in one province, Como, in eleven years. He was a founder of Gruppo 7, the 1926 association that launched Italian Rationalism, and the movement label he used for himself was razionalismo, not functionalism or International Style. The Novocomum apartment block of 1929, the Casa del Fascio of 1932–36, the Asilo Sant’Elia nursery of 1937 and the unbuilt Danteum are the core of a body of work built almost entirely on reinforced-concrete frames clad in Botticino marble or rendered white. His concern was the relation between a structural grid and the wall that fills or omits it, and the results are more austere, and more geometrically argued, than anything else built in Italy in the 1930s. He was conscripted, sent to the Russian front in 1941, and died at 39 shortly after returning.
