It is difficult to take Villa Caffetto in at a single glance. Built for artist Claudio Caffetto (1942-2022), this extraordinary house near Brescia in the Lombardy region of Italy reads like a manifesto for sculptural architecture. With its rich and layered architecture, a composition of geometric shapes and oblique forms in concrete, glass and metal as visually complex and intricate as Giovanni Battista Piranesi's famous etchings of imaginary 18th-century staircases, represents an Italian movement of late modernist and brutalist tendencies which emerged in the 1970s, influenced by the then-popular postmodern and High-Tech trends.
This specific chapter of 20th-century architecture led to the creation of some of the most experimental and bold examples of modern domestic architecture, despite falling into oblivion over time. Villa Caffetto puts this era back into the spotlight.
