Rationalism is that ordering criterion, child of the positivist nineteenth century, which will be dressed, in the twentieth century, in glass and reinforced concrete and will wield – revolutionary – the right angle and the essential planes of Cubism as purifying swords in the absolute name of geometry. “New spirit” of Le Corbusier, Gropius and Melnikov that will eventually find, in the Italy of Bardi, Terragni and Pagano, ideal – and ideological – affinity with a regime calling for equal rigors, equal urgency of order. The founding three-year period for rationalism in Cagliari runs from 1933 to ’35 and must necessarily be read together with two names: Ubaldo Badas and Salvatore Rattu, young torchbearers of that “new sobriety” in the island capital. Fearless and perfect of courageous innovative rigor the first, more moderate the other, but hybridized at times with bold futurist enthusiasms. It was 1933, when Rattu wedged the Zedda-Zedda building into the curve of Via Macomer toward Piazza Garibaldi: a fluid block of overlapping horizontal bands, chromatically alternating, shaped to accompany the curvilinear motion of the street in the soft rounded corner. Striking, even today, is the aggressive contrast with the neo-medieval “passatism” of the adjacent – and coeval – elementary schools.
As does not go unnoticed by the vertical and dynamic overbearingness of the equally blunted acute angle of Ebau Palace, which pounces with its rationalist prow on the straight stretch of Paoli Street, threatening the baroque inflections of the neighboring buildings, facing Paoli Street and St. Benedict Square.
In the Park of Remembrance, finished in 1934, Badas modulates instead – masterfully – a refined culturalist cue and turns with a modern and innovative flair to the forms of a glorious “national” past. In short, he reduces to a rational minimum a typology current in the local Romanesque: he raises two high “littoral” walls to clamp the limestone threshold of a single nave – a space sacred to the memory of heroes – that stretches out, open under the vault of heaven, rises in the trachyte chancel, and concludes in the final exedra-apsis, dominated by the Cross.
The entire monument – one of the most successful of its kind, in the context of Italian rationalism – is governed by an orthogonal, calculated composure, animated by the refined chromaticism of the stone materials: skillfully matched and alternated to evoke ancient “Pisan” inlays but also, the reds and whites – stylized – of the insignia of the mythical “Sassari.” The ultra-modern monumental “machine” of Badas, is wanted with acute semantic awareness, by the Potestà Enrico Endrich to flank, in blunt contrast, the showy eclecticism of the barracks of the Carabinieri Legion, Cagliari’s first reinforced concrete construction.
A didactic example of the conservative and “passatist” side of the regime’s architectural taste, the mighty building had been inaugurated in April 1933, signed by Angelo Binaghi, although it is to his partner Flavio Scano that we surely owe the neo-Mannerist flair of certain gigantism in the articulation of the exterior members, and again that “manly” rotation of the huge beveled corner that houses the imposing entrance.
