The Paradoxes of Prefabrication: Politics of Construction in Vico Magistretti's Villa Arosio and Marcello D'Olivo's Villa Spezzotti

Prefabrication and the industrialization of the construction industry are often discussed in the context of social and affordable housing but rarely within luxury buildings such as villas. In this essay Michela Bonomo argues that attempts to resist or test prefabrication techniques were the buildings of seaside villas in postwar Italy. Bonomo advances an original ‘critique of ideology’ of postwar Italian architecture in which the villa was used as a way to mask the failure of a structural reform of the construction industry. The often-celebrated idiosyncratic style of 20th-century architecture and their artisanal building techniques were—according to the author - a political project by the ruling class. This project, whose goal was the control of the labor force by supporting its fragmentation found in the design and construction of widely published villas a potent ideological sublimation. The author advances her critique by examining two holiday villas built by two exemplary Italian architects: Vico Magistretti’s Villa Arosio and Marcello D’Olivo’s Villa Spezzotti. An important focus of the essay is the politics of construction and the labor conditions that the building of these villas implied. The ultimate goal of this essay is to develop a political discourse on architecture at the level of typology and construction. This essay is a chapter of Michela Bonomo’s dissertation, Guilty Pleasures: The Project of ‘Seaside Villa-mania’ in Postwar Italy, 1958-1973, which will be defended in 2026.