Giuseppe Terragni (1904–1943) was an Italian architect who led the Italian modern movement under the name of Rationalism, working mostly under Mussolini's fascist regime. Born in Meda in Lombardy, he studied architecture at the Polytechnic University of Milan and in 1927 opened an office in Como with his brother Attilio. In 1926 he was among the founders of Gruppo 7, whose manifesto attacked neo-classical and neo-baroque revival. His career lasted only 13 years, and most of his small body of work stands in Como, one of the centres of Italian modernism. Sent with the Italian army to the Eastern Front in the Second World War, he suffered a breakdown and died in Como in 1943.
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His best-known building, the Casa del Fascio in Como (1936), the local party headquarters, is a square block 33.2 metres wide and half as high, its façade proportioned by the golden ratio, with an assembly hall lit through a glass-block skylight. With Pietro Lingeri he designed the Casa Rustici in Milan (1935), and the nursery school Asilo Sant'Elia in Como (1937) followed.
