In 1921, he enrolled at the School of Architecture of the Politecnico of Milan, where he graduated in 1926. In the same year, he was able to study ancient monuments during a study trip to Naples and Pompeii. In this stimulating cultural milieu, he founded Gruppo 7 together with other students (Ubaldo Castagnoli, Guido Frette, Sebastiano Larco, Gino Pollini, Carlo Enrico Rava and Giuseppe Terragni). Gruppo 7 would be involved in many projects of the period (such as the Casa Elettrica) In 1929, with Gino Pollini he opened the architectural office in Milan where they would work together for over 50 years. At the beginning of the 1930s he met Gege Bottinelli, with whom he shared a common interest in photography: the couple married in 1935. Through the work of artists and writers from De Chirico and Henri Rousseau to Baudelaire, Archipenko, Cocteau and Man Ray, he developed his own ideas about the mutual relationship between man/nature and inside/outside. His love for mountain hikes influenced his ideas about the natural environment. A later trip in the Mediterranean islands led to reflection on spontaneous architecture. Figini began a long correspondence with the writer Carlo Belli, in which they discussed the cultural fields that interested them (music, literature, cinema, and painting). 1934 saw the beginning of his long professional relationship with the enlightened industrialist Adriano Olivetti, who was to commission several works from Figini and Pollini. In a notebook started in the summer of 1933, he defined the idea of his house and atelier as a "growing house" (casa che cresce) and a "thermos house" (casa thermos). The first term indicates a house that will be flexible and grow with the changes in the composition of the family; the second refers to a natural system designed by the architect to optimise ventilation and heating.   Figini tried to give his own house a very personal character, a sort of "casa-persona" (house-person) in which life is organised in harmony with nature and the outside world in general. The garden around the house, and above all the terraces on the top, confirm this idea. The bedroom is designed in close relationship with the terrace: though this is not a huge space, it is well equipped with a pool, a small garden, and sports facilities. It overlooks the terrace below, which leads into the dining room. Here the wall is cut in an open window to frame the mountains on the horizon and to underline the importance for the architect of open-air life. Inside, an aquarium is designed to provide a kind of living still-life. As a painter and photographer, Figini was interested in the contemporary experience of surrealism, and realised the so-called "living painting" (quadro vivente): photographs are treated like paintings where the living subject - often Gege Bottinelli, his wife from 1935 - is as much a part of the composition as the inanimate objects and the classical references of the whole. The composition of the house is based on the golden section, a rectangle of 18 x 5.5 m (= 99 square meters) and is oriented, following the heliothermic rules of rationalism, on the north-north-east and south-south-west axis, to exploit as far as possible the weather in order to obtain the proper conditions of comfort inside. The idea of the thermos house is to bring fresh air in the morning from outside, on the north side; then, to close the windows hermetically to keep the inside temperature lower than outside. Only when the temperature inside is higher than outside will the windows be opened. In the same direction, Figini designed other technical solutions, only partially implemented, like the "isothermic terrace" with natural ventilation or the position of the rooms inside at different levels to encourage the flow of the air mass. The parallelepiped volume of the house is suspended on six pairs of pillars and a narrow staircase, ship style, linking the garden to the entrance. On the first floor (3 m high), is a kitchen, an office, the maid's room, a wardrobe, the living room and the terrace; on the second floor are the owner's bedroom and bathroom, both open onto the two terraces of the flat roof. The white, compact Corbusian block is designed inside with a more complex composition of levels, voids, and views. The structure is a grid of reinforced concrete, filled with light insulated walls made of pumice stone (Gregotti, 1996). Inside, the artificial lighting is designed to control the effects of light, its direct and indirect impact on the space and also on the natural element present inside: the water in the bathtub is lit up like a blue grotto. Moveable spotlights are used in order to create a great variety of effects (Savi, 1990). In 1933, Figini described his own house in the architectural magazine Quadrante as a "memo of the minimum of material and spiritual needs" of contemporary man that must (or rather should) be satisfied in any standard apartment in a 10/15-floor building. His aim is to realise a sort of "anti-city" in the city: to guarantee the quality of life of his own house to people living in apartment blocks. In these terms, Figini's villa is a manifesto or memo reminding us of the amount of sun, greenery and sky necessary for a good quality life. Figini's house at the Villaggio dei Giornalisti is clearly influenced by Le Corbusier's five points (flat roof, pilotis, long windows, etc.) and the Ville Savoye in Poissy (1929-31), the first example of a building on free pilotis. Figini's villa is conceived as the upper floors of typical bourgeois apartment blocks in Milan at the time, the so-called "villa sul tetto" (villa on the roof). All the technical answers that Figini studied and applied reveal his technical competence and control in the design of the house, as well as his ability to transform solutions into aesthetic factors. < BACK Francesca Acerboni