Enrico Taglietti at the Town House Motel Bunda Street Civic, 1961.

Enrico Taglietti designed Giralang Primary School (1975). Photo: Max Dupain

Polish White Eagle Club by Enrico Taglietti (1970). Photo: Darren Bradley

Australian War Memorial Annex (1979) by Enrico Taglietti. Photo: Darren Bradley

Enrico Taglietti at his desk circa 1985. Photo: Ted Richards

Enrico Taglietti pictured at his studio in 2018. Photo: Mark Mohell

DIckson Library 1968. Photo: Harry Sowden

Arts editor HELEN MUSA reports that 99 years after the birth of Italian-Australian architect Enrico Taglietti comes an exhibition unique to the nation’s capital.

Taglietti: Life in Design will follow the life and career of Enrico Taglietti and the collaborations with his wife Franca, aiming to identify him as a true “global” architect, one who called Canberra “the invisible city”. 

Immediately recognisable for its unconventional sculptural shapes, Taglietti’s architecture shaped Canberra, seen in more than 40 projects across the ACT, including Giralang Primary School, the Center Cinema building and the Italian embassy. 

His contributions were recognised with the Australian Institute of Architects Gold Medal in 2007 and an Order of Australia in 2020. 

As well as original models from The Town House Motel and the Center Cinema, Canberra Museum + Gallery will show more than 60 architectural drawings and furniture designed by Taglietti, and sectional models of his structures by master of architecture students at the University of Canberra.

Visitors will encounter “spatial interventions” designed by Italian architect Gianmatteo Romengalili and will be able to create their own architectural forms in a re-created form of Taglietti’s studio.

When I catch up with Virginia Rigney, senior creator at CMAG, I find there has been a long gestation period for this exhibition, beginning almost seven years ago when she started there and was asked what shows she’d like to do.

She had immediately nominated one about the visionary Taglietti, who was to die in 2019. 

“It’s been a journey and a labour of love,” she says. “Considering CMAG’s mission, he’s a perfect subject, someone with a local, national and international presence.”

It’s not easy to talk about architecture, Rigney says, even in Canberra, and it’s often sidelined, so that significant new buildings are often unveiled here without any reference to the architect.

“What was so incredible about Enrico was that and his wife Franca chose to make a life in Canberra in 1956 when they had the world at their feet,” she says. 

Educated at the Politecnico di Milano, where he met Franca, he’d been one of the curators in the X Milan Triennale in 1950 and was only in his 20s when he got the fateful invitation to come to Australia to work on the Italy at David Jones exhibition from Sir Charles Lloyd Jones, a scion of the David Jones family, who had trained as an artist.

Lloyd Jones had been strongly advised to go for one of Italy’s rising stars, Taglietti, to design the show. 

For the exhibition in the main Sydney DJ’s art gallery, he brought over a full-size gondola from Venice, Bernini glass sculptures, kitschy items such as a replica of Michelangelo’s David and, notably, a life-sized Milan bedroom. 

“Enrico wanted the space to have real objects and a spiritual feeling,” Rigney says.

 Arriving in Australia in 1955 was almost a second honeymoon for the globally curious Enrico and Franca, but what is little known is that as a boy he had spent 10 years in Asmara, Ethiopia, where his father worked in the family metal business. That meant he felt comfortable in Canberra, which had a similar space and light as opposed to what he called “the greyish tone of Milan”. 

He saw this is a global city, saying: “Canberra was such a non-conventional place, most probably because it was quite empty and that was the fascination of Canberra… together with the fact that a young fellow arriving from Italy could mix without any problem with a physics atomic energy scholar and with a prime minister.”

Rigney’s work has been buoyed by that of her exhibition co-curators, architectural historian Silvia Micheli from the University of Queensland and Tanja Taglietti, daughter of Enrico.

Together they invited Romengalili here in November. He knew Taglietti well, so once here, he distilled Enrico’s practice to seven design principles: Threshold/Gate; Framing the Landscape; Compression and Expansion; Growing from the Ground; Breaking the Edge; Dissolving the Façade, and Deceiving Gravity. 

I ask Rigney to explain a couple of these. 

Framing the Landscape means that with his design, you won’t find many conventional square or rectangular windows like 99 per cent of ours, but rather most of them are polyhedric – geometrically shaped.

“It’s not just a fancy thing,” Rigney says. “He realised that looking at a window from inside a house is something you’re going to do a lot of, so he structured the relationship between indoors and outdoors.

“In the house he designed for Prof Patterson in Aranda, he raised the windows to high-up in the kitchen where you can see a sliver of the landscape. 

“We have created a polyhedric window shape hanging as a symbolic entrance to the exhibition. We hope the windows will invite you to be curious. Enrico wanted people to think differently.”

Compression and Expansion can be seen in the now repurposed Center Cinema in Civic, a heritage-listed building that has been painted over. It was the first cinema in Australia that had the screen underground, so that you effectively squeezed down a flight of stairs into a special experience in a big place, lit by blown-glass orbs, one of which will be on display.

“It gives you a sense of a spatial journey, gives you a release,” she says. 

Taglietti: Life in Design, Canberra Museum and Gallery, June 7-February 22.