In this paper I examine Cesare Cattaneo and Mario Radice’s Camerlata Fountain in northern Italy, focusing on the work's relation to the urban environment and its "mobility" over several decades. As I demonstrate, the design of Cattaneo and Radice’s work relates to the circular layout of a traffic intersection and was intended to be viewed from the window of a moving automobile. In this way it continues a tradition, begun by the Futurists and continued by Le Corbusier, which saw the car as central to modern art and architecture. Moreover, the work relates to the concept of mobility in so far as it was in itially built in 1936 in Milan and subsequently destroyed and reconstructed during 1962 in its current location near Como. As the history of the work’s conception, production and reception demonstrates, Cattaneo and Radice’s work not only responds to the experience of vehicle-generated mobility in modern society but also reveals the tensions and anxieties associated with an increasingly dynamic urban environment.
