Escape from the Avant-Garde: The House as a Stage of Memory

The Avantgarde and Modern Movement dogmas proposed a refusal of history, past, memory, in the name of a renewed vision and representation of the world. As a critique of this intuition, and to escape the outcomes of this strategy that took place in the cultural, artistic and architectural scenario and was realized in the urban environment, the domestic interior became an opportunity, as a theatrical stage, to celebrate memory and history. The paper focuses on these themes and in the case study of the work of Mario Praz, who transformed his own home in Rome, depicted in his autobiographical book The house of life, into an archaeological stratification of re-collections. The house can be read, using his words, as the “museum of the soul”, the “mirror of the spirit” and the “projection of the ego”: the inhabitant’s monument and theater, and an individual and private counterpoint to the Modernist Avantgarde’s tabula rasa of the past.