Villa Schiozzi, in via Manzoni n. 36

Umberto Cuzzi (Poreč 1891 – Turin 1973)

Umberto Cuzzi was born in 1891 in Poreč, Croatia. He studied in Gorizia, moved to Vienna, and graduated in architecture from the Polytechnic University of Turin. He joined the Italian Rational Architecture Movement (MIAR) and participated in the First (Rome, 1928) and Second (Rome, 1931) Italian Exhibitions of Rational Architecture. Between 1928 and 1929, the Casa del Balilla in Gorizia was built, considered his true "first work." In 1933, for his friend and engineer Guido Schiozzi, he designed Villa Schiozzi, a building of approximately sixty square meters per floor, arranged on two levels by an elegant semi-curved staircase. The exterior features a series of differently overlapping terraces, joined by a flagpole and bordered by tubular parapets that recall both the naval language and a certain shipbuilding aesthetic that Cuzzi was well acquainted with and described by Le Corbusier in 1923 in his "Vers une architecture." Overall, its structure is composed of elegant interplays of volumes and described by Licio Damiani in 1992 as "a true jewel [...] captured in an enchanted purity of Cubist origin." Abandoned for decades, the house acquired a new splendor with the intervention of the DDM studio between 2015 and 2016.