Villa Girasole. The Revolving House

Monograph on Angelo Invernizzi's Villa Girasole — a house that rotates on itself, as the name implies, to follow the movement of the sun. Built between 1929 and 1935, it is a jewel of rationalism and Art Déco, surrounded by a beautiful park and eleven hectares of land. The villa revolved for the first time November 14, 1933. The surveyor Mario Daverio recorded the event in the daily notebook of the construction site: the futuristic utopia of a building that moves, thanks to mechanics, “the most beautiful of a Greek statue” “. Even Pierluigi Nervi, another virtuoso of reinforced concrete, had imagined “to free the houses from the slavery of immobility”, but Angelo Invernizzi succeeded. And moving a whole house of 15 thousand quintals, not just a classroom or an operating room like others had imagined.