ERNESTO LA PADULA
Ernesto Angelo Lapadula, or La Padula, also known as Bruno (Rome, 1902 – Rome), was an Italian architect and urban planner. La Padula was also active as a cartoonist, illustrator (activities for which he chose the pseudonym "Bruno di Lucania"), painter and, finally, as a journalist. After the war he published articles in various newspapers in which he harshly criticized the methods and quality of the reconstruction of Italian cities from which young architects had been excluded.
In 1928 he joined the MIAR (Italian Movement for Rational Architecture) from which Italian Rationalism began. His studio in Piazza del Popolo in Rome was initially the place where MIAR members held their meetings. Among his many activities, he distinguished himself as a designer of furniture and furnishing objects in collaboration with the National Agency for Crafts and Small Industries.
After having designed, in the period 1937 - 1941, the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana as group leader he accepted, in agreement with the other two architects Giovanni Guerrini and Mario Romano the appointment as "procurator with full powers" in the design and artistic direction of the exhibition of the Exhibition of Italian Civilization: but the exhibition, which was then to give rise to a permanent museum, was not held due to Italy's entry into the war.
Son of the socialist Donato Lapadula (Pisticci 1873 - Rome 1949), Ernesto, despite participating in the competitions announced by the fascist regime (including the setting up of numerous exhibitions, including the autarchic Exhibition of the Italian Mineral) preserved, like many Italian architects and engineers of that period, his political ideas and his studio were also frequented by opponents of the regime, including Antonello Trombadori, Lidia Duchini and Leonida Tonucci, artists and intellectuals.
From 1934 to 1940 he was the assistant in Architectural Drawing and Monument Surveying at the Royal University of Rome, from 1940 to 1948 professor in charge of the same subject and from 1942 to 1946 professor in Interior Architecture at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. Two brothers, the architects Attilio Lapadula (Pisticci 1917 - Rome 1981) and Emilio Lapadula (Pisticci 1922 - Rome 2010), collaborated with him in the Rome studio and a third brother, the doctor Ettore Lapadula, actively participated in the cultural life created around Ernesto, as an art critic.
He was one of the founders and first president of the Art Club of via Margutta in Rome which became the meeting place for painters, sculptors, architects, writers, poets, actors and directors in the early post-war years. In 1948 he left Italy for Argentina where the National University of Córdoba had offered him, through his friend Arch. Ernesto Puppo, the chair of Architectural Composition and then that of Urban Planning . His arrival at the Argentine University corresponded, thanks to Ernesto and other young teachers, to a profound renewal, in a modern sense, of the teaching of Architecture and Urban Planning. A large part of his writings on urban planning and the history of cities can be dated to these years . He also collaborated with the magazines "Historia del Urbanismo" and "Revista Económica". He was the urban planning consultant to the provincial governments of Córdoba, Catamarca and Salta, and responsible for planning ( Asesor de Planificación ) of the city of Córdoba.
In 1963 he returned to Italy where he dedicated himself above all to drawing and painting. Most of his projects and writings are preserved in his studio in Rome, which has been declared of "relevant historical interest" and therefore a cultural asset. All documentation relating to his activity as a designer and photographer was bound by the Archival Superintendency of Lazio on 2 December 1992. The current manager of the archive and the studio is the architect Bruno Filippo Lapadula .