Home - Biography


Ulisse Stacchini
(b Florence, 3 July 1871; d Sanremo, 1947).

 Italian architect.

 Soon after graduating in Rome he moved to Milan, where he set up an architectural practice with the engineer Giulio De Capitani. From the last years of the 19th century he worked for private patrons building houses, offices and shops, among them the Savini Cafè Restaurant. He kept abreast of architectural fashion, working in the Art Nouveau style, in which he designed the wine store (1900-02) for the Unione Cooperativa in the Corso Sempione, Milan. His Milanese town houses were influenced by contemporary foreign styles. The house at Via Gioberti 1 (1903-4), for example, is a linear composition developed in parallel registers derived from Viennese models, rather than a coordinated and unified sculptural mass. The Casa Donzelli at Via Revere 7 (1907-9) is still expressed in geometric rather than the sculptural terms of Art Nouveau, however, with the decorative details in an imaginative Oriental style. In his winning competition entry for the Monza Cemetery (1912) the monumental aspect of this language is emphasized, a characteristic shared by the projects submitted by Gaetano Moretti, Giuseppe Sommaruga and Ernesto Pirovano. The Central Station, Milan (see MILAN, fig. 7), is Stacchini's major work. The competition of 1912 required that entries be related to a general plan by the engineer Cesare Saldini. Stacchini's design was selected because it was the most successful in formally linking the various parts of the complex interchange of urban and railway traffic. Building work was delayed, however, until 1926, and in the interim Stacchini was forced to make a number of significant alterations. He preserved certain characteristics of the initial design, such as the refined linear quality of details and the monumentality of the whole, but when the station was inaugurated in 1931 it appeared outdated from both a technical and architectural standpoint, and Stacchini's reputation was badly affected.

Works:

 Casa Donzelli in Milan

Villa Magnani in Induno Olona ( VA )