Liberty in Naples

With liberty in Naples is meant an architectural declination of the floral current developed in the city of Naples in the first two decades of the twentieth century, mainly on the Vomero, Posillipo and Chiaia district.

It was born as a decadence of eclecticism, many of the buildings of this period reflect therefore trends related to the eclectic and monumentalist architecture of the second half of the nineteenth century, for example some palaces of the Amedeo District. Architectures that take on the characteristic of a sort of urban castles are designed by Francesco De Simone, while Emmanuele Rocco’s more modest eclectic liberty is expressed in some residential buildings in the suburbs. At Vomero instead, the main designer is Adolfo Avena, who adopts a liberty languagevery rural. While more mature forms of the style were reached between 1910 and the outbreak of the First World War with the Neapolitan work of Giulio Ulisse Arata and Gioacchino Luigi Mellucci and engineers Gregorio Botta and Stanislao Sorrentino.

Introduction

Historical overview of urban and architectural events in Naples

Neapolitan urbanism between the nineteenth and twentieth century
The years immediately following the annexation to the Kingdom of Italy saw a fervent rise of the entrepreneurial class included in the building industry. The city was the most populous in the country and needed to be displaced by the excessive population density that was concentrated in the historical areas. In 1860, the axis of via Duomo was designed by the engineers Luigi Cangiano and Antonio Francesconi. The works already planned in the last months of reign of Francesco II of the Two Sicilies were realized after September of the same year, when Giuseppe Garibaldiassumed the title of provisional dictator and issued the executive decree. The episode of via Duomo was the first of a series of events related to the renewal of the post-unified city.

One of the hot topics of that period was the extension of the Naples waterfront. During the nineteenth century numerous projects were presented about it but none of them followed. In 1868 a Commission composed of Rodolfo d’Afflitto, Ettore Capecelatro and architect Federico Travaglini was organized with the aim of examining the various requests for concession in many areas of the city and re-proposed the theme of reorganizing the promenade and in the seventies of the century the tender was assigned to the company Giletta-Du Mesnil with the commitment to realize the reclaim at sea between the Torretta a Mergellina and the Castel dell’Ovo. After several negotiations between the Du Mesnil and the City of Naples it was agreed to agree on the times and the works, entrusting the design to the Neapolitan engineer Gaetano Bruno. They ended very slowly due to the lack of liquidity of the contracting company and ended around 1885. In the same years in the City Council it was back to discuss about the eventuality of the reclamation of the Saint Lucia district until the project for the new district was approved in 1886, following the issuing of the Special Law of the Rehabilitation of the previous year.

Moving further into it, along the current Amedeo district, there was a vast urban program designed to redefine the western areas of the historic city. As for the waterfront, even within Chiaia there were several projects promoted by the Bourbon kingdom and reconfirmed by Garibaldi in the first days of the annexation. The design for the western quarter was drawn up in 1859 by the same team that designed the Maria Teresa Course [N 1]. It provided a long straight axis that linked via Chiaia with the last loops of the course. The project started a series of long discussions among professionals, who put forward further project and economic proposals to the problem raised. The debate ended in1871 when the city administration directly entrusted the project to the architect Luigi Scoppa and Federico Rendina on the basis of a project drawn up in 1868. At this stage of the work was built the lot between the current Piazza Amedeo and Via Andrea d’Isernia. In 1877 the second lot corresponding to the current Via Vittoria Colonna was executed. The low wings of Palazzo Carafa di Roccella and the gardens of Palazzo d’Avalos del Vasto were sacrificed for its construction, and the pincer staircase of the Church of Santa Teresa in Chiaia was spared. A third lot was built starting in 1885with the special subsidies of the law for sanitation and concerns the completion of the road axis from the Rampe Brancaccio up to via Chiaia with the destruction of part of the garden of Palazzo Cellamare. The works to complete the works find the conclusion after the end of the Great War.

During the expansion of the city following the cholera epidemic of 1884, a satellite district was planned to occupy the areas downstream of Castel Sant’Elmo and behind the Floridiana villa. The new hill district, the Vomero, was built with the concession of tender to the Banca Tiberina that referred to the Discount and Sete Bank. To encourage the urbanization of the area, both the Municipality and the contracting entity undertook to implement the extension of the old connecting roads and the creation of new ones, as well as the construction of two mechanized ski lifts: the Chiaia funicularin 1889 and the Montesanto funicular in 1891. The project of the new district started in 1886 but soon it was subjected to revision by the Bank itself under pressure from the Municipality to realize with primary importance the infrastructural network of the entire Vomero district, making the expansion of the Arenella to be built in second place. after the Great War. On 20 February 1889, following the causes generated by the huge speculative bubble absorbed by the banks of the Kingdom, the Banca Tiberina was liquidated and incorporated into the Discount Counter which soon, together with other entities, was reunited in the newly formed Bank of Italy. The few buildings built by Tiberina are concentrated between Via Scarlatti and Via Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Several buildings were put into liquidation as well as the land not built, the remaining were acquired by the Bank of Italy, the Banco di Napoli and the Municipality of Naples. Progressively the soils sold to the Banks were acquired by small entrepreneurs who created smaller subdivisions within the large insulae envisaged by the plan so as to arrive in 1910 to the Bank of Italy Letting Plan which counted the presence of two hundred and twenty-two lots to be sold to private individuals..

The late eclecticism of Lamont Young
Lamont Young was an isolated personality in the urban architectural scene. Of Scottish descent from the paternal and Indian side on the maternal side, he trained at the Swiss schools. These personal factors contributed to Young’s style. At the beginning of the twentieth century he was the author of several significant architectures that distanced themselves from the academic style made by local professionals. His cultural matrix led him to a continuous experimentation of several styles able to harmonize with each other, this way of seeing architecture opened the way to the stylistic solutions of the floral movement that in that period was born and spread in the city.

His most important works from the new century are the Aselmeyer Castle and Villa Ebe. The first one realized during the works of the new Grifeo Park as its residence, together with a series of buildings built along the loops of the narrow main street of the park, constituted an interesting route among the different forms of the eclectic architecture of those years as the neogothic villa Curcio, already built in 1875and inhabited by Scarfoglio and his wife Serao. In this villa, the themes that were dear to the Anglo-Saxon romantic world of the Pre-Raphaelites, Ruskin and Morris on medieval language were explained. The villa was conceived as a small castle characterized by a central male falsely injured.

Aselmeyer Castle presents slightly different linguistic canons, it draws from the repertoire most dear to Young, the Tudorian one creating a sublime commingling between the English taste of the characteristic lowered arches, the geometric frames of the strongly accentuated windows and the bay windows with those of the Italian tradition from the Neo-Romanesque flavor like the presence of round windows and polyphoras supported by slender columns. The entrance is emphasized by an atrium that recalls the shapes of the ravelin present in the English castles. To accentuate this successful fusion of elements also contributes the wise use of local stone and the skilful play of volumes completely asymmetric in their entirety and able to make the construction highly modern in the local context.

Art Nouveau in the city

Leonardo Paterna Baldizzi, Giovan Battista Comencini, Gioacchino Luigi Mellucci, Antonio Curri and Angelo Trevisan: The first approach to the floral style
The first phase of Liberty saw architects and engineers as protagonists linked to non-local investors and for academic reasons transferring to Naples [N 2]. Antonio Curri, originally from the Bari area, was trained under the guidance of Enrico Alvino at the Academy of Fine Arts. Already in 1880 he showed off at the first competition for the monument to Vittorio Emanuele, winning the silver medal. In the same year he participated in the Exposition of Fine Arts in Turin. The experiences of the competitions allowed Curri to develop new stylistic approaches that were then unknown to most of the designers. Between 1887 and 1890he was among the designers of the eclectic Galleria Umberto I along with Emmanuele Rocco and Ernesto Di Mauro. The work is anchored to the Umbertine language, in vogue in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, especially for buildings for public use. The first approach to change came with the work at Caffè Gambrinus in 1890, mixing timidly late-Umbertine motifs with those from beyond the first Art Nouveau. Most probably Curri was aware of the artistic changes that took place in the rest of Europe and in particular in France [N 3]. Always at the turn of the century, commissioned by the important Neapolitan playwright Eduardo Scarpetta, he designed La Santarella according to the styles still permeated by the language of medieval castles inaugurated by Young.

Giovan Battista Comencini and Angelo Trevisan arrived in the city as technicians of private companies of the north who invested capital in the urbanization works following the events of the Rehabilitation. Comencini began its Neapolitan activity in 1885 in the transformation works that involved the area of Piazza Municipio. On the occasion of the arrangements he designed, between 1895 and 1899, the Grand Hotel de Londres, adjacent to the Mercadante Theater, considered as one of the first Italian examples of the new style for interior design. Today lost in the change of destination of the structure that houses the TAR of Campania. In1902, on the initiative of Alfredo Campione, became the author of the interior of the Grand Hotel Santa Lucia in via Partenope and today completely distorted by the modernization of the hotel.

Both De Londres and Santa Lucia had the characteristic of having a false linguistic correspondence between interiors and exteriors, outside they were presented as symmetrical late-nineteenth-century factories dominated by neo-Renaissance taste. Another cornerstone of the floral style of Comencini is the hall of the Polytechnic Artistic Circle built in 1911. Angelo Trevisan arrived in Naples in the early twentieth century and was promptly contacted by Giulio Huraut for the design of a hotelin the new Piazza Amedeo in the homonymous district. It is configured as an imposing symmetrical building located behind the surviving gardens of Palazzo Balsoranoand separated from the square by its own garden planted with palm trees. The architecture of the building recalls that of the neo-Romanesque architectures with vaguely Moorish influences but the highest quality remains in the personal interpretation of these elements in a wholly original way with the presence of interesting exceptions on the use of orders, all joined by the iron decorations beaten, glass, majolica, furnishings and minor plastic adhering to the floral taste. In the same years he was the author of the villa Maria at the beginning of via del Parco Margherita, wanted by Huraut himself as his residence upstream of the Grand Hotel. Between the two buildings there is not a significant stylistic difference so as to appear as a single complex.

Leonardo Paterna Baldizzi is the most significant representative of this phase of the floral movement. He arrived in Naples in 1905 as a professor at the Polytechnic, Paterna Baldizzi was from Palermo, was formed under the guidance of Giuseppe Damiani Almeyda and began to attract attention to the artistic and cultural scene through holdings to Palermo the Exhibition in 1891 that one of Genoa ‘s 1892. After serving in 1894 and winning the retired in 1896 he moved to Rome permanently where he came into contact with Ettore Ximenesand with avant-garde artistic circles. In Naples the first commission that took place was the realization of the fitting out of the Knight Jewelery in Piazza dei Martiri in 1906 and now transformed after the damage of the War. It should be mentioned because it represents an emblematic case of the floral achievements in Naples, so much so that it greatly benefited the urban spread of the new trend of taste. Paterna Baldizzi also distinguished himself for the projects of multi-family dwellings at Vomero. The first two Marotta houses were born in 1911, the cavalier Marotta wanted by the building contractor, and the Cifariello building in via Solimene. In 1913 the third house Marotta was built and in 1914it was the turn of Villa Paladino alla Gaiola. The style of Paterna Baldizzi was characterized by the extreme compositional simplicity of the façades outlined by very geometric stucco elements such as in the third house Marotta and Cifariello house but at the same time enriched by wrought iron elements with squares that give a great elegance to the architecture as in Villa Paladino.

Giulio Ulisse Arata and the clients of the company Borrelli, Ricciardi and Mannajuolo, Gioacchino Luigi Mellucci

Arata, of Piacenza origins and of Milanese education, graduated from the school of Ornato and left for Naples with the task of carrying out military service and later dedicated himself to the activity of decorator. During this first Neapolitan phase, lasting about two years, Arata began to make the first contacts with entrepreneurs and local artists. In this phase the first contacts were made with the company Borrelli, Ricciardi and Mannajuolo who in those years was building the villa Mannajuolo al Vomero and the Hotel Bertolini at the Grifeo Park, both works oriented towards a modernist decoration.

Arata continued his formative process returning to Milan and then to Rome where he found again in 1906 the company Borrelli, Ricciardi and Mannajuolo occupied in the construction of the Palazzaccio. Fabio Mangone puts forward the hypothesis that Piacenza could have lent his collaboration to the difficult and long construction of the Palazzaccio during these Roman years. In this delicate phase, the consolidation of the relationship between Arata and the company dates back and at that moment what could be defined as the Arata style was formed. Always Mangone realizes in the Arata style of how in the works, both Milanese and Neapolitan, the relationships with the Milanese Art School are clear, and with the work of Giuseppe Sommarugain particular, especially as regards the desire to create an authentically Italian version of modernism, vigorously plastic. Apart from the two-dimensional graphisms of the Franco-Belgian and Austrian art nouveau, one looks at other European experiences, such as the Prague Secessionism or Catalan modernism, accentuating above all the floral component, readable in the tumid naturalistic decorations. Without hesitation, modules belonging to the academic tradition are also accepted, subjected to distortions or free interpretations, and assembled alongside European neologisms, with extraordinary combinatorial skills, in a fabric that is in some way classicistic.

At the second Neapolitan period he was attributed the paternity of the decorative apparatuses of Palazzina Paradisiello, made for the Impresa Borrelli, Ricciardi and Mannajuolo. Already in 1959, De Fusco attributed, in his essay Il Floreale in Naples, to the hand of Piacenza. Later, in cataloging it was attributed to Gaetano Licata, a hypothesis also collected by De Fusco himself in the second edition of his essay in 1989. Mangone, in his essay on Arata, claims that the building, with a neo-baroque setting, is already designed and built and later Arata would have created, with decorator tasks, the drawings of the stuccos, of the wrought iron and of the internal staircase. The following year he became the author of the Leonetti palace. Articulated according to a U-shaped plan, open with a garden towards Via dei Mille, it effectively solves the problems posed by the context creating significant relationships with the two isolated contiguous ones: one originally green and the other characterized by the presence of the ‘Avalos del Vasto, preceded by a garden. In this way, the author opposed the directives of the urban plan which provided for all the aligned fronts. The minor plastic is entrusted to the stucco decorations that recall the classic motifs distorted by the incursions of floral elements and the elaborate wrought iron grilles of the balustrades of the balconies and of the external gates.

At the same time, Arata and the engineer Gioacchino Luigi Mellucci took care of the design of a further building to be rented on the opposite side of the same road and at the Agnano Thermal Complex and built by the same patrons who supported the architect with the technicians Carlo Borgstrom and Luigi Centola. The complex, designed in the best cultural intentions of the time, consisted of two peripheral wings, which housed the mud baths and the stoves, connected by a central body that served as a hall for events and galleries. The Aratean project proved to be quite magniloquent in the forms that could be defined as a classicist building with strong modernist influences with constant reference to the language of Sommaruga.

Adolfo Avena, Francesco De Simone and the neo-eclectic float drift
Adolfo Avena and Francesco De Simone represent two prominent personalities within the floral movement in Naples. Both became spokesmen for the linguistic echoes introduced by Lamont Young. In particular, Avena managed to reconcile an innate interest in structural engineering and the use of avant-garde technologies with careful historiographic research, playing a key role first as an official of the Ministry of Education between 1886 and 1899, then as a director between 1899 and 1908 and finally superintendent of the Monuments of Southern Italy from 1908. Starting from the Ten Yearsof the twentieth century, deeply embittered by the denigrating attacks of the press on his work, gradually moved away from the field of monumental protection and devoted himself with renewed enthusiasm to the design of urban residences and villas. All the works created before the outbreak of the war are affected by these hybridizations between a renewed eclectic experience of neo-modernist taste with modernism, the latter visible above all in the strongly free planimetric schemes.

Villa Loreley, was among the first of the houses built by Avena al Vomero, his favorite neighborhood for the experimentation and construction of its architecture. It was built in 1912in the first corner of via Gioacchino Toma, so much so as to influence the compositional aspects such as the L-shaped plant. Even Villa Ascarelli suffers from the same compositional peculiarities, also located in a hairpin bend in via Palizzi, plays subtly with full and volumetric voids enriched with loggias, stucco motifs and beaten irons. In the other works of Avena, a more dynamic and complex spatiality are followed by motifs of medieval origin as Villa Scaldaferri, the same architect’s villa, both demolished during the post-war reconstruction of the Fifties and Sixties, and the later examples of Villa Catello-Piccoli in 1918 and Villa Spera in 1922, as well as the multi-family buildings built in via Toma in 1928 to complete Villa Palazzolo and the building at the Grifeo Park built in the same years.

Francesco De Simone was a Salento engineer who graduated from the Application School of Engineers of Naples, where he later established himself professionally. He became known with the urban plan of 1914, but before tackling the urban problems of the former capital he worked as a designer adhering to the new floral language. In 1906 he designed the Velardi building. The building was among the first to adopt reinforced concrete slabswhich made it possible to realize the bold overhang at the time of the angular lookout tower. Precisely the presence of the latter characterizes the building as a sort of castle.

Gregorio Botta and villa Pappone
A cornerstone of the new architectural current of the beginning of the century was Villa Pappone, built in 1912 by the will of the wholesale artificial flower seller Francesco Pappone. The building project was entrusted to engineer Gregorio Botta, a professional who had several projects in Egyptthen controlled by the English protectorate, while the client acquired the tastes and cultural trends of the period thanks to the continuous cultural exchanges with Europe.

The cultural confluences of both favored the birth of a wide-ranging architectural project that was culturally aligned with constructions across the Alps. Despite the appearance of a three-story leasehold, it is one of the few in Naples only for the residence of the client. The villa has, unlike many other contemporary buildings in the city, all the typical floral features such as the absence of symmetry in the plan and along the elevations due to the presence of bodies added to the figure of the plant’s matrix; the different heights of the individual bodies that make up the volume; elaborate finishes in stucco accompanied by wrought iron balustrades of different design and culminating in the entrance shelter in iron and glass, the string courses decorated with majolica. The continuous stylistic references refer to the language of the Viennese Secession, filtered through the Italian works published by the Crudo & Co. house in Turin.

The minor designers of the floral
The current of the floral managed however to create a discrete following of designers who, following the fashion in vogue, managed to adapt to the style with more or less creative ideas. Among those best known are Emmanuele Rocco, Stanislao Sorrentino, Michele Capo, Gioacchino Luigi Mellucci, Michele Platania, Gaetano Costa and Augusto Acquaviva Coppola.

Emmanuele Rocco, an engineer who graduated from the Application School for Engineers of Naples in 1875. It became one of the technical operations of cleansing for the reconstruction of the Umbertine district of Santa Brigida where together with Antonio Curri took charge of the Umberto I Gallery. In the early twentieth century joined the floral current with the project of Palazzina Rocco. The singularity of the building is its volumetric variety. For the need to have a prospect surface capable of containing the maximum number of windows, the facade on the Margherita park, presents a series of folds. Despite this openness to the new style, it is filtered very timidly through compositional aspects still linked to the nineteenth-century world as the symmetrical formality and the presence of classical stucco, the counterpoint to these aspects is managed by the design of the shelter and the window frames of the openings. In the same was the turn of a condominium building in via Crispi and Palazzo Fusco in via Filangieri, two buildings characterized by a lukewarm liberty approach with tendencies to more consolidated eclecticism.

Stanislao Sorrentino, engineer employed at the Société Anonyme des Tramways Provinciaux and author with Adolfo Avena of an aerial cableway project between via Toledo and Corso Vittorio Emanuele, designed the Ermolli Palazzina Russoin the hairpin bend of via Palizzi. It is characterized by an access located near the penultimate floor of the building and is connected to the road through a short walkway, under the roadway there are four more floors clearly visible from Piazza Amedeo. Compositionally it meets the criteria of style adopting asymmetrical volumetric solutions, while the minor plastic takes up the motifs of the plastered plaster on which are superimposed motifs that incorporate plant elements that culminate in the mighty crowning of hammered concrete that derive from the Viennese Secession.

Michele Capo, an engineer graduated in Naples in Civil Engineering in and in 1894 in the Naval one in Genoa, began with the city building production still linked to the eclectic formalism of the late nineteenth century. In line with the current liberty designed the building Guide to Porta Capuana and Arienzo house in Sant’Eframo old, of little spatial interest because it is characterized only by wall motifs. In 1904, together with Ettore Bernich, he designed the villa Elena and Maria in forms still conditioned by a markedly eclectic language with some decorative concession tending to floral for secondary bodies. Of greatest architectural interest is Villa Cuomo of 1919. In plan, its rooms continue in the building without interruption. The most interesting part is given by the stairway where the connecting element is formally separated from the wall box and supported by iron beams like a swan.

Gioacchino Mellucci was an illustrious engineer from Naples, one of the first to conceive new buildings using the expressive power of reinforced concrete. He is considered a secondary character of the floral season as his work was limited to the definition of the supporting structures of the buildings designed by the company Borrelli, Ricciardi and Mannajuolo, then designed by architect Arata. In the most individualist works at the Margherita park, compositional ideas can be read towards a less pragmatic reinterpretation of eclecticism.

Michele Platania, also an engineer, was the technician of the Compagnia Italiana Grandi Alberghi and he realized at Villa De Cristoforo in via Palizzi. The construction, very essential in its lines, entrusts the decoration of the elevations to geometrism through red plastered bands. The small construction anticipates through its meager image the tendency of the protorazionalism of the late twenties of which Platania became one of the protagonists.

Gaetano Costa, resurrected in 1927 with the late floral construction of the Mergellina Station, was an active designer in the floral environment of the Ten years with modest constructions characterized by a floral plastic on space installations linked to the nineteenth-century tradition. He designed two typical examples of floral at Vomero, the two De Marinis houses, currently demolished to make way for modern apartment buildings.

Augusto Acquaviva Coppola designed the building for rented dwellings at Margherita Park in 1912 as the only building adhering to the new language. The building is characterized by compositional aspects taken from the late nineteenth century building as the adoption of the block type without a courtyard. The peculiarity is that of being in a particular location where further three floors are added downstream and the ground floor is home to the small Teatro San Carluccio. Despite the traditional layout, it presents along its prospects decorative apparatuses derived from the reinterpretation of elements originating from the Viennese Secession.

The decadence of Liberty
The liberty began to enter a crisis after the end of the First World War, when it reached its peak in the city. One of the factors that contributed to the decadence was that of the country to gradually close itself between its territorial borders due to the rising phenomena of nationalism in the old continent. This problem was the cause of cultural dislocation between the various modernist movements. Many Italian designers after the parenthesis of Art Nouveau took refuge in the mannerisms of academic neo-eclecticism, regressing the most modern linguistic innovations within a few years. Giulio Ulisse Arata who returned to Naples for two projects of condominiums made for the company Cottrau-Ricciardi in Piazza Amedeo and Piazza Sannazaro already feel the detachment of the designer from the freest forms of the floral recovering from the formal academic vocabulary the return to order with the application of symmetrical systems typical of the bourgeois palace of the previous century and adorned with an epidermis of neoclassical matrix.

The inefficiency of Neapolitan floral production is essentially linked to a decorative taste that did not affect a spatial theme. It should also be considered that the years of the floral represent in Naples those of the greatest imbalance between the ruling class and the technicians. It should also be remembered that between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century a new professional phenomenon began to occur. For the first time in Italy the designers found themselves working in both local and extra-regional areas to move with the relative technicians from one end of the country to the other.

The movements almost always took place from the North to the South, which led to the southern architects to make few experiments, placing them in a condition of subaltern intellectuals. At the same time we must also consider the training of Italian designers, especially those from Naples, coming from highly consolidated academic realities of the Engineering Application Schools and Fine Arts Academies. Many of them were involved in civic battles with the publication of articles in newspapers and magazines such as Gaetano Costa or in the protection of monuments such as Adolfo Avena. This commitment also led the best designers to sacrifice the unrealistic attitude of the floral to be traced back to a neo-eclecticism that resumed, although influenced by the floral season, the nineteenth-century compositional styles.

A minority front of the designers of the floral season began to question the academic attitude of the Schools of Engineering and Fine Arts, orienting themselves towards the scarification of floral compositional motifs, simply leaving the play of fullness and emptiness together with the skilful play of the adopted materials. They, among them Michele Platania, began to turn with the look at what happened over the Alpine arc like motion decò, the protorazionalismo matrix Loos and behresiana and the Nordic classicism Gunnar Asplund. At the same time the nationalistic ideals of the fascist regime began to spread, which imposed the compositional rigor derived from Italian classicism to the architecture of the state. In the 1930s the nucleus of the Faculty of Architecture of the “Federico II” University of Naples was established. The management of a faculty, dedicated to the renewal of professionals involved in building processes towards the emerging dictates of the modern movement, was entrusted to Raimondo D’Aronco, a bulwark of the Italian modernist season before the linguistic retrocession towards neo-eclecticism and the re-proposed classicism.

Works
The art nouveau has left a great testimony in architecture and the arts, in fact the Neapolitan liberty has not only dealt with a simple architecture and designed for the design of buildings but also small pieces like the Gay Odin stores that preserve after many years the original showcases of inlaid wood in the eponymous style .

Source from Wikipedia