In 1991, the Yale exhibition ‘Giuseppe Terragni: Two Projects’, coupled two unbuilt projects by Terragni, the lesser known Mambretti Tomb and the well-known Danteum in the same architectural setting to foreground the architect’s formal language and reflect upon his possible motives and intentions. The two projects shared many commonalities: they were both unbuilt; they were both designed during the later mature career of the architect; they were both amply documented and developed allowing for an in-depth analysis; they both foregrounded a commemorative and symbolically laden program; and significantly, as the curators of the exhibition wrote, both exemplified “a personally imposed agenda which informs, indeed drives, these works”.

This work here takes on the same two unbuilt projects by Terragni to reflect upon the exhibition, test its outcome and claims, offer alternative methods to foreground the principles and the logic upon which such claims can be made, and ultimately suggest a new interpretation of the work. More precisely, the work here provides a formal specification of the Mambretti Tomb and the Danteum in the form of two parametric shape grammars that can be used to reconstruct them. Contrary to the formal analysis of the exhibition that concentrates on the relation between form and symbolism using underlying schemata of specific proportional shapes and spatial relations, this work defines specific visual rules for each project that when taken together foreground explicit similarities and differences between the two projects and suggest logical inferences and constructions between both. More broadly, this work aims at uncovering systematic deep structures behind both projects in order to gain a better insight in the ways formal vocabularies and spatial relations within Terragni’s work express the architect’s constructive deployment and transformation of compositional principles of neoclassicism and modernism.