Architecture
For Enrico and Franca Taglietti, whose lives and work are memorialised in an exhibition at Canberra Museum and Gallery, Australia’s capital city was an architect’s dream. By Naomi Stead.
Enrico and Franca Taglietti memorialised at Canberra Museum and Gallery
The allegory is almost too perfect. It’s 1955, and a bright young Milanese architect, briefly visiting Australia, travels to Canberra to scope out the site for a new Italian embassy. Bewitched by the light and landscape, the open space and the freedom from Italy’s weight of history, he falls in love with the nascent national capital, making it his home and the site of his life’s work over the subsequent six decades.
Embraced by local society, the architect and his collaborator wife build a kind of living embassy, as emissaries of a style of life, of culture and design, with a foot in the old country but a passionate commitment to the new. This is the story of Enrico and Franca Taglietti, as told in the exhibition Taglietti: Life in Design at Canberra Museum and Gallery (CMAG), curated by Silvia Micheli, Tanja Taglietti and Virginia Rigney.
The moral of the fable, and the meta-narrative of the show, is that the Tagliettis – who could have gone anywhere – chose to forsake all others and live in Canberra. It might sound like boosterism if it weren’t slightly plaintive: a counter to more popular contemporary narratives of Canberra as the butt of a national joke, a parochial country town built of bureaucracy and roundabouts, a city where there’s just no there there.
In contrast, the exhibition shows how the Tagliettis saw Canberra as a place of profound possibility, a small but intensely cosmopolitan place where, in Enrico’s words, “a young fellow arriving from Italy” could mix with ambassadors, professors and prime ministers and have the opportunity to design the greenfield “churches and pubs, cinemas and libraries, embassies and houses and schools” he eventually did.
Unlike many émigré architects, the Tagliettis weren’t driven from Europe by persecution or hardship – Enrico was already a rising star in Milan and had plenty to go back for. Their main destination in Australia was actually Sydney. Enrico was the guest of Sir Charles Lloyd Jones, cultural advocate and chair of DJs, who brought him over to work on the fabled “Italy at David Jones” exposition that opened in July 1955. But despite being feted in the emerald city, Canberra emerged for them as a culmination, even an epiphany.
Enrico later mythologised their arrival: “during an afternoon in September many years ago – the wattle and prunus in bloom, the mountains sprinkled with snow – I reached the city of Canberra in a Fiat 500. A city without towers, without golden domes, without cathedrals, a city without a past. It was the dream of any modern architect. There was nothingness: the silence, the music, the clean slate, the end of an exploration, maybe the destination, and the invisible city.”
CMAG is focused on the social history and visual arts of the region and it finds an interesting niche in their overlap – where social history can be told through the arts and vice versa. In this the Tagliettis make a rich subject, not only for the breadth and significance of the architectural output but also their household-name prominence, and embeddedness in the life and history of the city.
They also complicate another established narrative, that of the émigré architect as beleaguered and broken, driven from a philistine Australia in despair. Jørn Utzon is one powerful example of this, Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin are another. While there have been hugely successful migrant architects, Harry Seidler among them, there are also many stories of professional lives blighted by the xenophobic myopia of the Australian ugliness.
It’s true the Tagliettis were glamorous, charming, well credentialled, spoke good English and surely benefited from a degree of cultural cringe. Yet the extent to which they were embraced by Canberra society, by the national architectural community and, indeed, in the nation’s highest honours – Enrico received the Australian Institute of Architects Gold Medal in 2007, and was made an officer of the Order of Australia posthumously in 2020 – shows that the migrant architect story in Australia hasn’t always been ignominious.
Franca was herself a trained architectural talent but, in the manner of many architectural couples, often relegated to the pretty fashionista on the great architect’s arm. The curators have sought to reclaim her rightful place as a significant force in the collaboration, especially in the design of their shared life as Gesamtkunstwerk of language, art, furniture, music, fashion and food. Daughters Tanja and Tabitha Taglietti describe the family home as a collage, constantly rearranged and reinvented, never ossified. The exhibition is full of artefacts that illustrate this conscious style of life.
A pitfall of architectural exhibitions can be the “book on the wall” mode – the exhibition not as a rich spatial experience but rather an accumulation of representations stuck flat. Looking to avoid this, the curators commissioned Gianmatteo Romegialli, a longstanding collaborator of Enrico, to analyse his spatial principles and introduce them into the exhibition design. This works particularly well in the joyfully exaggerated plinth-scape where the architectural models are displayed.
Today, many of the commercial buildings have been demolished or, like the former Center Cinema, dramatically altered. But reportedly none of the houses have been knocked over – which is telling. Some, like the McKeown House, have attained semi-legendary status.
Enrico did not build extensively outside Canberra – notably the St Kilda Library, and Saint Anthony’s Catholic Church in Marsfield in Sydney’s north-west – but the work was known on the global stage, appearing frequently in the international architectural press and in the seminal 1979 Transformations in Modern Architecture exhibition at MoMA. It now seems astonishing that of his three buildings selected for this show, one was a motel – the Town House Motel in Wagga Wagga – and another was a public school – Giralang Primary.
This is not a functionalist mode of international-style modernism – it’s more idiosyncratic than that, more playful – perhaps stemming from Enrico’s interest in the “organic” architectural principles of Frank Lloyd Wright and especially Bruno Zevi. The buildings might be solid but they’re not without drama, they’re serious but not without exuberance – angled planes hook together and jut out, walls slice away on the oblique, rainwater gutters take on heroic proportions, the visitor crosses low, compressed thresholds into towering voids of light.
The work’s humanity is most evident in the libraries – notably Dickson Library – and schools – both Giralang and Flynn primaries, completed in the early 1970s, were experimental in their spaces and pedagogical agenda. Learning spaces tiny and large, low and tall, with cathedral roof and open courtyard, skewered with porthole views. At Giralang, Enrico described an attempt “to be anti-architect and anti-teacher … giving the environment back to children and supporting the proposition that primary education should be not only compulsory and free but also exciting and merry”.
All of the Taglietti buildings are monumental and powerfully grounded – I won’t say rooted – but pressed into the earth with deliberate and definitive firmness. Almost always formed in concrete, this is an architecture of weight and mass, one that plants its foot rather than tiptoeing. Many of the buildings even look like little fortresses, splayed buttressed walls and all. They stake a claim, and I use the language deliberately – there is a degree of colonial arrogance in assertions of Canberra’s “lack of history”. To be fair, this is not solely a criticism of the Tagliettis – up until quite recently, it was a central characteristic of the discipline, which had no conception at all of what it might mean to design on Country. At last that’s changing.
Many of Enrico’s drawings are seen here for the first time in public, alongside his own black-and-white photography – retouched later with bold flashes of yellow. Like many architects, he had an eye on future self-presentation. I wonder what he’d think, walking around this display of the couple’s life work and legacy. It’s a comprehensive and sympathetic show. Many of the ideas are evergreen: Enrico once asked, “why not create something beautiful … when you can do it for the same cost as something ugly?” It’s a question that remains painfully apposite.
Naomi Stead travelled to Canberra with the assistance of Canberra Museum and Gallery.
Taglietti Life in Design is showing until February 2026.
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This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on July 12, 2025 as "Canberra concrete".
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