Event Details

In February of 1949 Bruno Morassutti (1920-2008), three years after graduating at IUAV, left Italy towards the United States in order to attend the Taliesin Fellowship: an apprenticeship program given by Frank Lloyd Wright at his two residences of study. His stay at Taliesin East in Wisconsin lasts from May to September 1949. From October of the same year to March 1950 the young architect follows Wright’s community in Taliesin West in Arizona. As Morassutti will later recount, this experience stimulates in him a strong tendency to look forward by resizing his notions of an historical past. During the stay, Morassutti takes direct vision of Wright’s oeuvres from various periods of his activity and photographs them with the aid of a camera loaded with color film. The visual report covers with few images also works of other architects present in the American territory in those years. Visual representation of architecture in color was more than an analytical tool. Nearly four hundred slides (framed in cardboard) countersign the outcome of this precious photographic campaign. These early outstanding color images were displayed at IUAV and at many other Italian universities classes allowing architectural students to fully appreciate Wright’s remarkable and unseen design. Even Carlo Scarpa will visually enhance his lecturing with the same slides and will keep them on a permanent loan. The slides were returned to Morassutti only after Scarpa’s death in 1978. Among the important ‘returns’ of Morassutti’s experience at Taliesin and the meeting with his master, one cannot fail to highlight the role these images have had in the Italian architectural press. These were: the Casabella memorial issue (number 227) devoted to Frank Lloyd Wright, Domus 305 with Morassutti’s reportage on Johnson Wax Laboratories’ construction site, Domus 356 where Morassutti writes the architect’s obituary. In this tribute article, the author takes charge of Wright’s legacy symbolizing it with Taliesin East’s mill and in doing so he delivers his teaching at the architecture of our present time. This exhibition is the rewarding collaboration between IUAV and Antonella, Valentina Morassutti and Sebastiano Rech Morassutti who carefully kept their father slides in the family archives. The photographs here shown are mostly unpublished and printed for the first time. Only a few had appeared printed in black and white in Domus and Casabella. Altogether they represent the result of a careful cleaning and restoration completed by the Venetian photographer Francesco Barasciutti who has not only saved them from the decay caused by the constant light exposure inside projectors, but he has been able to give new birth to the original colors revealing to the spectator unusual details and above all the different tonalities of the materials adopted by Wright and other architects (like Soleri and Aalto) of Morasutti’s American journey.