E.N.

As an expanded system of footnotes to the works by Davide Cascio, the catalogue collects texts and images which circle around the idea of esprit nouveau thinking. In his essay Francesco Pedraglio explains the methodology of Davide Cascio’s frail dialectic between potential future utopias and past artistic phenomena. Additional essays by Annette Amberg and Luigi Fassi mention the programmatic magazine L‘Esprit Nouveau founded by Le Corbusier in 1918, the pavilion constructed by Le Corbusier in 1925 for the International Exhibition of Decorative Arts in Paris and Le Cabanon: Le Corbusier‘s summer cabin, a tiny bolthole built in the south of France in 1952 for his wife. Antje von Graevenitz discuss the architecture of Monte Verita, while Vita Banga relates how the Latvian modernist architect Marta Stana turned the summer house into a kind of functional escape from the confining ideological borders of the Soviet regime in Latvia in the 1960s. A visual essay by Davide Cascio goes along with the texts. »Gusto Gräser refused to live in a hut and was against the use of money. For stretches he would live in the niche of a church or in a small grotto, always seeking a brave woman to live with him there.« (Antje von Graevenitz, For Light and Air: Self-Determination on Monte Verità, 2008.)