IL MITO DEL GOLFO NELL’ARCHITETTURA DI LUIGI COSENZA: LA LOGGIA MEDITERRANEA PER LA MOSTRA ITINERANTE “ITALY AT WORK” (1950).

Luigi Cosenza, the most important Neapolitan architect of modernity, has been among a tenacious defenders of the Campania tradition both in spontaneous forms and in those educated in official historiography. He loved with the same intensity the Vesuvian peasant houses and the impressive ruins of Magna Graecia, the rich churches of the Neapolitan Baroque and the simple architecture of the islands. Reproducing them in a contemporary key has also managed to redeem popular expressions that with a snobbish and superficial attitude have often been confined to an aesthetic category of “inferior” value. On the occasion of the traveling exhibition “Italy at Work” (1950) across the United States, designed to promote Italian craftsmanship and design, Cosenza had the opportunity to develop an organic project on these issues. This experience, unpublished in the bibliography of the Neapolitan architect, is important because it reveals unknown aspects of his work on the interior design scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]