Ernesto Lapadula Biography
Having moved to Rome from his native Pisticci (MT), he graduated in 1931 from the Higher School of Architecture, directed by Gustavo Giovannoni, with a project for the Casa del fascio in Taranto. Even before graduating, he had begun both his professional activity in 1927 with the project relating to the competition for funerary monuments, and that of an article writer and cartoonist, under the pseudonym of Bruno di Lucania. He joined the Miar (Italian movement of rational architecture) established in 1928, following the I Exhibition of rational architecture organized in Rome by Adalberto Libera and Gaetano Minnucci, and began his collaboration with other architects of the Roman School, in particular with Giuseppe Marletta, with whom he would work from 1929, the year of the project for the redevelopment of Villa Bellini in the center of Catania, to 1933 with the competition for the Magistrate's Court of the Appio district in Rome. In 1933 he participated together with Antonio Valente in the competition for the Italian pavilion at the Chicago Exposition, won by Mario De Renzi and Adalberto Libera. The years from 1933 to 1937 are those of his most fervent activity: he participates, in fact, in various competitions for the construction of the magistrates' courts, the post office buildings and, together with Vittorio Cafiero, Mario Ridolfi and Ettore Rossi, in that for the Palazzo del Littorio, banned by the National Fascist Party in agreement with the Governorate of Rome and the Italian Academy in two different phases, first in 1933 and then in 1937. Particularly noteworthy is the Nautical Casina of the Knights of Columbus Foundation on the Lungotevere Flaminio in Rome of 1934, with a distinctly rationalist imprint. In 1937 he took part in the competition for the E42 Universal Exhibition held in Rome to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the regime, in which the Bruno Ernesto Lapadula, Giovanni Guerrini, Mario Romano design was the winner, creating one of the best-known works, the Palazzo of Italian Civilization. The project, partially revised by maestro Piacentini, enhances the classicist direction, later theorized by Lapadula himself in his 1948 paper entitled The theory of abstract proportions. Meanwhile, on 9 June 1939 the Committee for the Exhibition of Italian Civilization, to be held inside the "square Colosseum" directed by Cipriano Efisio Oppo, entrusted the task of planning the exhibition to the same group that had designed the building, appointing Bruno Ernesto as prosecutor in 1941, to «act for all matters relating to the artistic planning of the Exhibition of Italian Civilization...», an exhibition planned with great detail, but in fact not realized, due to Italy's entry into the war. Alongside his professional activity, there is an academic activity at the Royal University of Rome, where he was an assistant in the chair of Architectural Drawing and Monument Surveying from 1940 to 1948, and at the Academy of Fine Arts of Rome, where he taught Interior Architecture. . In 1942, together with his brother Attilio, he won the competition for the urban and architectural layout of the city of Bratislava and the competition for the Ministerial Square in the same city, projects with a classicist orientation of the Roman School, which gained great appreciation. In the years of industrial reconstruction, after having designed the elevation of the Pisticci Town Hall in 1948, he left Italy to go to Argentina, where he taught architectural composition at the University of Cordoba and Urban Planning at the local School of Architecture, as well as working as consultant to the Government of the provinces of Cordoba, Catamarca and Salta for the study of urban planning plans. In this period he wrote most of his writings on urbanism and the history of urban planning, as well as collaborating with the magazine «Historia del Urbanismo» of the University of Cordoba. Bruno Ernesto died in Rome in 1968, leaving the legacy of his papers to his brother Attilio who will continue the activity of the studio, where the archives of both are currently kept.
