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De Finetti, Giuseppe
(b Milan, 5 March 1892; d Milan, 19 Jan 1952). Italian architect. He left Milan in 1912 and went first to Berlin and then to Vienna where he studied under Adolf Loos (1913–15). Returning to Italy in 1920, he graduated from the Istituto di Belle Arti in Bologna (1920) and then settled permanently in Milan (1921) where all his executed works are located. Initially his interest centred on the design of hotels, and in 1923 he edited the building sections of the Manuale dell’industria alberghiera. In the same year he designed and built the Hotel Touring, Via Parini, in a style that favoured the burgeoning Novecento Italiano, and by 1926 he was participating in the competition for Milan’s urban development with some of its members. The Casa della Meridiana (1924–5), Via Marchiondi, a six-storey, stucco-faced building housing five flats, is possibly his best-known work. He combined elements of the modern architecture of Loos—simple volumes, smooth undecorated surfaces and flat roofs—with an elegant and restrained use of classical motifs such as a lightly modelled frieze that defines a two-storey base (also with flat brick quoins) to the whole composition of set-back masses (originally designed to avoid a tree that no longer exists), string courses and pilasters. The house by De Finetti on Via S Calimero (1930) attempts the same stylistic conciliations, and his commitment to tasteful restraint is expressed even more brilliantly in his interior designs for the Bottega di Poesia (1923), Via Montenapoleone, and Negozio Moda (1927), Piazza Duomo (both destr.), and above all in the Villa Crespi (1938) at Ronchi di Vigevano, near Milan. In 1931 political conscience obliged him to resign from the Sindicato d’Architetti, and from this date his interventions took the form of articles on aspects of town-planning development in Milan: the Arena-Parco Sempione district (1933), Piazza S Babila (1937) and Piazza Diaz (1937). This activity was intensified in the period between 1944 and 1950, when war damage made the problem of reconstruction particularly urgent. In 1946–7 he founded and financed a periodical called La città, the contents of which were brought together in a book published in 1963.
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