10 Facts About Pietro Fenoglio

Pietro Fenoglio was an Italian architect and engineer, considered one of the most important pioneers of Art Nouveau in Italy.

Pietro Fenoglio took advantage of the very favorable economic climate to become one of the style's most fervent supporters in northern Italy before the First World War.

Pietro Fenoglio was born in 1865 in Turin, four years after the modern unification of Italy into a single kingdom.

Pietro Fenoglio's father Giovanni was an administrator, while his mother Giacinta was the daughter of the former Prefect of Chambery, who had moved to Turin after Chambery had been annexed by France in the Treaty of Turin in 1860.

Commissions in a period of rapid economic expansion and prosperity were plentiful and Pietro Fenoglio became extremely prolific, establishing his studio at 60, Via XX Settembre, where he designed some of the major Italian examples of Art Nouveau.

Pietro Fenoglio's work became increasingly recognizable by his strategic use of pastel colors, the ornament that alternates between floral subjects and circular geometric elements, and from the wide use of cement frameworks combined with the sometimes-daring decorative elegance of iron and glass.

Pietro Fenoglio was one of the organizers of the 1902 and 1911 International Expositions in Turin, but he was active in the publishing field, numbering among the founders and serving as one of the most important contributors to the magazine L'architettura italiana moderna.

Thanks to his newly-acquired experience in the field of industrial plant design, Pietro Fenoglio was entrusted with of the vast project of the Leumann Village, the working-class neighborhood in nearby Collegno where, in addition to the Cotonificio Leumann, he built the houses and the school and the church of Santa Elisabetta, one of the handful of ecclesiastical structures in the world built in Art Nouveau.

Pietro Fenoglio's activities were not confined to that of an esteemed professional designer.

Pietro Fenoglio was politically active, holding positions as city councilman and consultant for the study of the new town plan that was completed in 1908.