CATANIA. STILE DI FRANCESCO FICHERA

Fichera traversed the tension of 20th century architecture, in an exemplary manner, from the Liberty style of the Roman project of Villa Ghirlandina (1907) to the “exalted rationalism” of the project for the Tribunal in Catania (1936-53); proposing significant testimony as to how international suggestion and renewal can be practiced without betraying ones own cultural roots. He was a “classic” architect in the Vitruvian sense; the rules of “firmitas” and of precise building methods, inherited from a “tradition” that he recognized as his genetic heritage (having a father, Filadelfo, who was a successful engineer and a professor of ornate style decoration at the University of Catania) constantly occupied him in his inquisitive research of the economy and functionality of a modern “utilitas”. He needed, above all, to develop innovation within, rather than outside, tradition in order to also discover a “constructive means of expression” along with “an ideal to express” (Fichera 1935).
This necessary reflection on the world of forms, regarding the values of the “new”, had been encouraged by his master Ernesto Basile, through a floral language that overcame the abuse of styles, not through their cancellation but by bringing them back to the elementary principle of nature. The first architectural projects that Fichera realized in Catania were inspired by this epochal progress: from Villa Miranda (1908-09), still reflecting the lessons of his Palermo master, to the more stylized works, like Villa Vagliasindi (1911) and Villa Majorana (1911-13), with which he explored the international horizon, admiring Wagner’s rigour in renovating tradition through a controlled opening-up to the modern Jugendstil, and aiming towards the linear geometries that Hoffmann used to overcome the vegetal suppleness of Art Nouveau stiffening it in orthogonal coordinates. Il was however Olbrich, “the genius Austrian architect, whose vitality was a violent and furious blaze” (Fichera 1914) who gave Fichera clear indications of how to decline floral sinuosity within vigorous volumetric configurations. In Fichera’s work, such volumes were often translated into contradictory, but always original, experiments. On one side, there were the terse layouts of Villa Simili (1909) and the Sporting Club (1913) that combined well with strong stereometric outline plans, allowing him to recover (through Vienna’s lessons) an ancient Mediterranean-arabesque tradition of Sicilian architecture, without falling into the trap of an apparent revival. On the other side, there were the unusual arrangements – in the Cinema Olympia (1913) and in Casa Lazzara (1919) – of a rigorous precision of typology and distribution combined with the decorative exuberance of the urban façade, that allowed Fichera to hint at the subtle connection between 18th century caprice and rationalism, that strongly characterised the city of Catania.
Starting in the 1920’s, Catania and its Baroque style became the ideal reference and the concrete grounds for a passionate research on the identity of its (own) architecture and on traditional construction principles. The architect did not operate a biased refusal of the new models offered by an international culture, to which he kept a watchful eye; he was only diffident, instead, of Italian architects whose hurried and mechanic adaptation of the “latest fashion”, often mistook modernity with a “spasm of originality that, with the extremists of the group, often borders on the grotesque” (Fichera 1935). He was also irritated that new architecture materials were superimposed or substituted “without a thought” to lessons of “mimesis of Nature” imparted by classical architecture.
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