The proposal to create a rationalist Milan museum comes from the desire to pay attention to the high-quality rationalist architectures heritage that characterize the city.

The city of Milan has already almost unknowingly a widespread museum distributed on its territory, a historical and cultural heritage made up of sites and monuments that are evidence of Milanese Rationalism.

The aim is to develop a historical research project that would allow the cultural and artistic climate of the city of Milan to be restored, identifying the places, the fields of intervention and the works in which the protagonists of this period applied.

In addition, architectures, foundations, professional studios and private archives have been sought and highlighted to make Rationalism more visible in the urban context and to demonstrate the potential of a network of connections between these preexistits.

Inside the museum headquarters we want to enhance this "camouflaged" heritage by placing the same architecture and the entire artistic, cultural and political landscape in which they have been set.

At the same time, we want to tell the professional and personal stories of great protagonists who, with their projects and their reflections, have contributed to delineating the new face of the Milanese architecture.

The object on display in the exhibition is the architecture of the city: in this sense, the project puts Casa Toninello, the work of Pietro Lingeri and Giuseppe Terragni, and the museum as the head of this series of architectural symbols of Milanese Rationalism.

The five houses realized in Milan by architects Pietro Lingeri and Giuseppe Terragni are the result of a unitary design research. Homes are commissioned to Lingeri by private entrepreneurs with the will to build investment houses.

Pietro Lingeri opened a studio in Milan with his friend Giuseppe Terragni in the gallery Vittorio Emanuele n.26 and between 1933 and 1938 executed the five houses in Milan, characterized by the presence on the last floor of private apartments for the same clients , often affirmed painters.

These homes, offices and warehouses, also hosted painters of the time, becoming the place where their art was born and established. In this regard, we can define these houses as works of the first Italian rationalism, which clearly clarify the close connection with the figurative arts in the 1930s.