Luigi Moretti remains one of the most enigmatic figures of Italian modern architecture. His work falls in the cracks between art-historical categories, and his writings lack the social polemic of most of his contemporaries. Yet he exercised a profound and lasting influence on Modern and Postmodern architecture. Born in Rome, he was educated there at the University of Rome, receiving his degree in 1930. He taught at the University of Rome (mainly history courses) from 1931 to 1934.

Two conflicting opinions by recent Italian historians can explain this problem. Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co, in their Modern Architecture, mention Moretti only once, stating, “Luigi Moretti (1907-74) locked himself into a formalism that was an end in itself in the so-called Sunflower house of 1950 in Rome, in the Olympic Village realized there with A. Libera, and in the Watergate Complex in Washington done in 1959—1961.” On the other hand, Luciano Patetta, in his entry for the Macmillan Encyclopedia of Architects, said, “Probably the most successful result... is the Watergate... a work of full maturity and in full possession of expressive means.”

Moretti never allied himself with either side of the heated debate about architecture of the Fascist period. When he emerged in the late 1940s and early 1950s with what were to become his major works—the Astrea and Sunflower apartment houses—he still remained aloof from contemporary polemics. However, during the Fascist period, he was an ardent follower of the regime of Benito Mussolini. Even after Fascism fell and Mussolini was installed by the Germans in a puppet regime in northern Italy, Moretti joined Mussolini in the so-called Republic of Salò. For this transgression against civility, he served 18 months in prison in Milan, and during his confinement, he met a developer who gave him a number of important commissions in the immediate postwar period. It has been said that Moretti never lost his love of Mussolini and Fascism. The first of these commissions was an apartment hotel (1948) in Milan, followed by the multifunctional “Transatlantico” building (1952-56), also in Milan. However, the two buildings that made Moretti’s reputation and that remain his undisputed Rome masterpieces are the Casa Astrea (1949-50) and the Casa Girasole (1950—51). These two buildings are sophisticated examples of a kind of mannerist modernism. Moretti used the elements of the modernist vocabulary in a highly decorative, somewhat Expressionist way, employing thin outrigger walls and spandrels, tile decorations, travertine revetments, and glass handrails. The Casa Girasole (Sunflower House) was later published by Robert Venturi in his seminal Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966), making the building a locus of architectural pilgrimages. Venturi and others have asked the question, “Is this one building split, or two buildings combined?” It was both, and the gash down the middle would become a Moretti trademark.

The building was influential in the development of the palazzina building type, a modern equivalent of the palazzo whereby the courtyard of the typical Florentine/Roman palazzo becomes the core, and the building, a squat tower, is free on all sides. In the massing and facades of the Casa Girasole, Moretti used a shallow layering system combined with the assertive horizontality of spandrels and window blinds to establish an aggressively modern equivalent of traditional formal composition. He even hinted at a split pediment in the top profile of the building.

At the same time in the early 1950s, Moretti began publishing a magazine, Spazio, which lasted for only eight issues but was quite influential in establishing this new formalism in Italian modern architecture. He also published analyses of traditional buildings and spaces, including solid models of the interior spaces of baroque churches. These analyses had an important influence on Moretti’s younger contemporary, the historian/theorist Bruno Zevi, and Zevi adapted Moretti’s spatial and sequential analyses for his popular book Saper vedere l'architettura (1957; Architecture as Space).

Moretti’s mature buildings include the Olympic Village housing blocks for the 1960 Olympics in Rome, an exercise in Le Corbusian Ville Radieuse urbanism and architecture. The facades of these buildings were in the Brutalist manner of concrete slabs and brick infill, with varying window sizes and openings. The Le Corbusian system of the “five points” —pilotis, ribbon window, free plan, free facade, and roof garden—was employed here to positive effect.

Rather than having any architectural significance, the Watergate complex is best known for its political significance during the Nixon era in the United States. Yet this building, a curvy array of great plasticity on the Potomac River near the Lincoln Memorial and the Kennedy Center, was one of the first multi-use buildings to be built in Washington in the post-World War II era. It, not the Kennedy Center, revitalized its neighborhood, and the building's assertive volumetrics were influential in changing a dour Washington style.

Moretti died at the time the Watergate hearings were underway in Washington.

Thomas Schumacher  

Sennott R.S. Encyclopedia of twentieth century architecture, Vol.2 (G-O).  Fitzroy Dearborn., 2005