20th century Italian architecture

The term Italian architecture of the twentieth century, means all those architectural currents that, starting from the artistic movement of Art Nouveau, developed in Italy in the twentieth century.

The Art Nouveau had in Giuseppe Sommaruga and Ernesto Basile two of the principal and most original exponents (respectively Palazzo Castiglioni in Milan, extension of Palazzo Montecitorio in Rome). A totally new language was announced with the publication in 1914 of the Manifesto of Futurist Architecture by Antonio Sant’Elia. The same published his tables of the “New Town”, proposing new architectural models that exalted functionality and a new aesthetic.

Rationalism manifested itself in Group 7 and MIAR (1926), but after the dissolution of the group emerged in the isolated figures of Giuseppe Terragni (Casa del Fascio in Como), Adalberto Libera (Villa Malaparte in Capri) and Giovanni Michelucci (station of Florence Santa Maria Novella, in collaboration). During the Fascist period the so-called ” Novecento ” (Gio Ponti, Pietro Aschieri, Giovanni Muzio) was most successful, from which it derived, in the wake of the rediscovery of imperial Rome, theSimplified Neoclassicism by Marcello Piacentini, author of several urban transformations in different Italian locations and remembered for the disputed Via della Conciliazione in Rome.

The second post-war period was characterized by various talents (Luigi Moretti, Carlo Scarpa, Franco Albini, Gio Ponti, Tomaso Buzzi and others), but he lacked a unified direction. Pier Luigi Nervi, with his daring structures in reinforced concrete, acquired an international reputation and was an example for Riccardo Morandi and Sergio Musmeci. In a season animated by interesting debates carried out by critics such as Bruno Zevi, rationalism prevailed and one of the paradigmatic works found in the Rome Termini station. To the Neorealism of Michelucci,Carlo Aymonino, Mario Ridolfi and others (INA-Casa quarters) was followed by the Neoliberty (found in the early works of Vittorio Gregotti) and Brutalism (Torre Velasca of Milan of the BBPR group, a residential building in Via Piagentina in Florence, by Leonardo Savioli, works by Giancarlo De Carlo).

Le Corbusier (project for a hospital in Venice) and Frank Lloyd Wright (project of a house on the Grand Canal, still in Venice) did not build anything in Italy, while Alvar Aalto (church of the Assumption in Riola di Vergato) succeeded, Kenzō Tange (towers of the Bologna Fair, floor of the Centro Direzionale in Naples) and Oscar Niemeyer (home of the Mondadori in Segrate).

In 1980, within the Venice Biennale, the Architecture sector was established, Paolo Portoghesi was appointed as director. On that occasion the “novissima road” set up by Costantino Dardi was set up and, commissioned by Paolo Portoghesi, Aldo Rossi created the “Theater of the World”, a floating and traveling theater that traveled through the canals of Venice. Aldo Rossi, the first Italian to win the Pritzker Prize, was undoubtedly one of the most influential Italian architects for the new generation. Rafael Moneo writes about it:

“I do not think I exaggerate by saying that already in the eighties they were marked – in Italy – by Aldo Rossi and Manfredo Tafuri and that any comment that is made around the Italian architecture of those years should be referred to them”

(Rafael Moneo, The Other Modernity: Considerations on the Future of Architecture, page 113.)
Also in 1980, the “Presence of the Past” architecture exhibition was held at the Venice Arsenal, where the major architects of the moment were considered to be post-modern, including Robert Venturi, Hans Hollein, Frank Gehry and Ricardo Bofill. In this way, Paolo Portoghesi, with a series of publications, launched the so-called postmodern architecture in Italy, connecting to other critics such as Charles Jencks and Robert Stern.

Modernist architecture. The Liberty STO
In the twenty years between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Italian artistic and cultural environment received the stimuli of this new stylistic trend. Ernesto Basile was one of the main performers with his numerous achievements of theaters, palaces and villas, including Villa Igiea in Palermo (1899 – 1900) and the extension of Palazzo Montecitorio in Rome. The main occasion was that of the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative Arts in Turin in 1902, on that occasion Raimondo D’Aroncohe designed the Italian Pavilion. Another prominent personality was Giuseppe Sommaruga who always built Palazzo Castiglioni in Milan in those years.

Futurism
Antonio Sant’Elia (1888 – 1916) is the most representative exponent of Futurist architecture. Its futurism is architecture in “movement”, the architectural space that is linked to time in a systemic project of the technological science of the machine. The universe of architecture expands and the urban dimension is interested in, precisely the New City, the most important project of this architect of 1913 – 1914, in which the Milan of the future is imagined in a collection of sketches and projects. The work of Sant’Elia was of the ” avant-garde”and had influence at the European level, and although partly linked to the Art Nouveau and the Viennese Secession in some traits, it unquestionably brings the signs of rupture with the past that he wants to transfigure.The drawings are almost all perspective but denotes the “movement” of the architectural forms of the represented megastructures The early death of Antonio Sant’Elia, at the front during the First World War, prevented the development of futuristic ideas in architecture, but in these archetypes many saw an anticipation of Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier.

Disappeared Antonio Sant’Elia, who fell in the Great War, in the twenties the futurism had already exhausted its momentum and in the aftermath of fascism developed simultaneously two different architectural trends: on one ‘s side rationalist architecture that represented the modern movement, in tune with the European trends of functionalism. On the other side, in order to spread its ideals among the masses and thus transmit the idea of greatness of the regime, fascism will favor the construction of monumental buildings with strong scenographic characteristics. The architect and urban planner who created and developed this monumental language wasMarcello Piacentini.

Group 7, MIAR and some isolated figures
In 1926 the ” Gruppo sette ” was formed, including, among others, Figini and Pollini and Giuseppe Terragni, some time later Adalberto Libera will also join. The group began to make itself known with a series of articles that appeared in the magazine Rassegna Italiana, but the most important occasion was that of the exhibition of rational architecture that took place in Rome in 1928. The group presented itself not as a revolution and tried in every way to redesign the new style as the most suitable for the fascist regime, of which on the other hand many young farmers (such as Terragni and Giuseppe Pagano Pogatschnig) are convinced supporters. It constitutes, so the MIAR, Italian movement for the rational architecture, which almost 50 architects who represent all the different Italian regions. At the 1931 exposition in Rome the impact is much stronger and it is clear that the rationalist works are actually too revolutionary and do not fit into an authoritarian regime. The controversy that arises with the supporters of the old academy, who then are the majority, generate many defections in MIAR, so that his secretary Libera is forced to dissolve the movement.

From this moment on, the rationalist architects will withdraw each one of them by working in the private sector and abandoning the public offices, even if they will manage to carry out various projects. The Casa del Fascio in Como (1932) by Giuseppe Terragni is one of these public works and is also the largest from a formal point of view, so that Zevi defines it as the “masterpiece of Italian rationalism”, for its pure volume drawn on the section aurea, which has a solid plant and almost “classical” consistency. The abstract decoration (now lost) made by Mario Radice should be noted in the Casa del Fasciowhich recalls the layout of the medieval public building in a very contemporary key, almost always with a frescoed internal courtyard. By translation, the painters of the group of the Italian Abstractists, Mario Radice, Manlio Rho, Aldo Galli are also called “Rationalists”, reflecting a common cultural forge that united painting and architecture.

The Institute of Physics of the University of Rome “La Sapienza” of Giuseppe Pagano – where the rational theme is controlled and not exposed as in the Casa del Fascio above – represents, instead, the major work from the functional point of view, in as in it we read a new design method: the building designed for the function for which it is intended. Another fundamental work is undoubtedly the S. Maria Novella Station in Florence (1933), where the design competition is won by Giovanni Michelucci and his pupils Baroni, Bernardi, Gamberini, Guarnieri, Lusanna. The classicists may deliberately withdraw in the worry of having to confront the back of theSanta Maria Novella. The building, however, despite its rationality, integrates well with the environment with its stone coating and design, appearing as the development of the architecture of the past. This will inaugurate a “modus” of Michelucci, perhaps an ” organic ” integration of rational buildings in the historic built environment, in a skilful work of materials, elements, relationships, architectural details. In 1939 the Cittadella d’Assisi was built by Gaetano Brusa.

In Milan, thanks to the magazine Casabella – Costruzioni directed in the forties by Giuseppe Pagano Pogatschnig and Giancarlo Palanti, they are mentioned in the famous article Intervallo optimista by Raffaello Giolli, reflecting the importance of the Milanese school, Gianni Albricci, Achille and Piergiacomo Castiglioni, Mario Tevarotto, Enea Manfredini, Anna Ferrieri, Luciano Canella, Mario Righini, Augusto Magnaghi, Mario Terzaghi,Vittorio Gandolfi, Marco Zanuso, Renato Radici as young rationalist architects.

Since 2008 the villa Necchi Campiglio has been open to the public thanks to the donation to the FAI in via Mozart in Milan, an example perhaps unique for beauty and conservation of a rationalist private villa of the thirties, designed and realized with skill by Piero Portaluppi.

Other important buildings, on minor or private assignments are:

the Sant’Elia nursery school of Como (1936 – 1937) by Terragni, which is perhaps his best work, for that free articulate and transparent expression that opens to the external environment;
the Case della Foce in Genoa (1936-40) by Luigi Carlo Daneri;
villa Malaparte in Capri (1938) by Adalberto Libera, a parallelepiped broken by the gradation of the solar roof terrace, which appears in relief but extraordinarily integrated into the rock of a promontory;
the Bocconi University of Milan (1938- 1941) by G. Pagano and G. Predeval, of clear rationalist style with reminiscences of the Bauhaus in the articulation of the plant;
some exhibitions for exhibitions (1934-35) by Franco Albini, Persico and Nizzoli;
two buildings and a library in Rome (1938-1940) by Mario Ridolfi.

Monumentalism. The role of Piacentini
Marcello Piacentini is the figure that more than any other dominated Italian architecture during the fascist regime: his are the major public tasks and his style will influence, or in some way will be imposed not only to many architects in the minor assignments, but also to the major rationalists like Pagano, Libera, Michelucci. The most significant example of this compromise will be on the EUR projecto E42, in which the presence of four rationalist architects out of five members of the commission can not impose its own line; Piacentini, using his tactic of mediator between traditionalists and modernists, wins, and his style triumphs in all senses in the architecture of the exhibition.

Its architecture is a sort of ” simplified neoclassicism ” that can be included in the series of trends that have been defined by critics with the term Monumentalism; symmetrical and blocked floor plans, closed volumes that must remember the ” Mediterranean Sea “; Classical architectural details with marble slab cladding, rhythmic arcades, columns, arches, symmetries. Many Italian cities are monumentally redesigned, with the demolition of important slices of the historic centerand the redefinition of its most important buildings in an ideal connection to the past ” Romanity “.

Today there is a certain revaluation of Piacenza’s “simplified Neoclassicism “, and this is linked to its apparent link to the forms of Postmodernism. A fact, however, is certain and accepted by everyone: the Italy of the twenty years is isolated from the most advanced European cultural world, which proposes the themes of the Modern Movement in architecture, so they are not known or misinterpreted by Italian architects. Everything is concentrated in superficial debate, which does not capture the original characteristics of the International Style and is reduced to an exterior modernization of style, with the adoption of simplified forms, smooth walls,full balconies, flat frames, lightened capitals, elementarised arches, smoothed columns, thus significantly lowering the level of public buildings.

The most important achievements of Italian monumentalization are:
the new university city of Rome although with some exceptions;
E42 of which many buildings were designed by rationalists;
via della Conciliazione in Rome; the historic center of numerous cities such as Brescia and Livorno;
piazza Augusto emperor always in Rome;
the city of foundation, monumental and reclamation.

Some new cities escape this logic of monumentalism:
the city of Sabaudia, designed among others by Luigi Piccinato;
the overseas city of Portolago in Greece, on the island of Lero del Dodecanese, which has a decidedly more modern imprint.

The post-war period
In the post-war period it is finally passed the simplified neoclassicism of Piacentini and rationalism takes over recognizing themselves in the line of the magazine “Casabella-continuity” which was already Pagano and Persico. The movement is characterized by architects of considerable skill such as Albini, Luigi Walter Moretti, Gio Ponti, Galmanini, Portaluppi, Carlo Scarpa, Figini, Pollini, BBPR, Michelucci, Giuseppe Samonà, but with oscillating personalities, and is disunited and does not carry forward a unitary discourse.

Internationally, the personality of Pier Luigi Nervi emerges, but also with the language of its structures, excellent synthesis of beauty and staticity follows a path that appears unique and personal. While on the other hand Bruno Zevi, architecture theorist, founded in Rome in 1945 along with Luigi Piccinato, Mario Ridolfi, Pier Luigi Nervi and others the Association for Organic Architecture, which in the Italian environment was struggling to impose itself.

Italy somehow remains closed to some weighty themes of’ International Style, the canons of ‘ architecture internationally of the twentieth century, passed in Italy, but are filtered and how you search for a highway Italian. Almost a symbol of this brake on choices, which decisively break with the past, it is the impossibility of the two greatest Masters of the Modern Movement, Le Corbusier and Wright, to realize their two projects in Venice (Ospedale and Palazzetto on the Grand Canal).

Important works of this rational logic but with purely Italian influences are:

in 1945 the Mausoleum of the Fosse Ardeatine, Fiorentino and others;
of 1946 the Episcopal Seminary of Reggio Emilia by Enea Manfredini
in 1948 the head of the Termini station in Rome, Montuori and Vitellozzi;
in 1949 -50 the goods exchange of Pistoia, by Giovanni Michelucci;
in 1950 the Palazzo per Uffici of INA in Parma by Franco Albini
in 1952 the Church of the Madonna dei Poveri in Milan, by Figini and Pollini;
in 1950 – 57 the internal arrangement of the Palazzo Bianco and the treasure of the Cathedral of San Lorenzo in Genoa by Franco Albini;
in 1955 the Ina Assitalia Skyscraper in Palermo by Carlo Broggi;
in 1955, gardens and extensions of the Clerici villa in Milan by Gaetano Brusa
in 1958 the Torre Velasca in Milan of the BBPR studio;
in 1956 – 58 the Pirelli Skyscraper by Gio Ponti whose structure was designed by Pier Luigi Nervi and where he finds the first real application of the curtain wall in the Italian reality;
in 1956 -58 the Palazzo dello Sport and the Palazzo Palazzetto dello Sport in Rome by Pier Luigi Nervi;
in 1956 the project of the Cathedral of Christ the King of La Spezia by Adalberto Libera;
in 1959 the Turin Motor Show of Morandi.
The reaction to the International Style
The architecture as well as the life of the whole country, after the Second World War, seems to awaken from a long sleep and see reality after a long time. This is how the architectural Neorealism is born, which perhaps takes its cue from the season of great value that this form of expression had already had in the cinema; in architecture, in fact, the movement is after the cinematographic one; this is the first reaction to the Modern Movement. His teachers are Mario Ridolfi, Carlo Aymonino, Ludovico Quaroni, Giovanni Michelucci, although the latter also spans other trends. Researchneorealist is focused on the compositional coherence of the materials, the technological choices, the architectural and constructive details, the sociological and psychological interpretations of the built environment and of the existing and historical architectural space.

It is precisely in this perspective of historical analysis of the building techniques of the past that the need already felt at the end of the thirties of the codification of knowledge of the art of construction arises. It will be precisely Mario Ridolfi, who comes from a family of entrepreneurs, will mediate between ” theory ” and ” practice ” constructive and cure the publication of the Handbook published by the National Research Council in 1946. All this information will then be immediately transferred to the post-war reconstruction of which the public housing works with the INA-Casa districts it will represent the example and the most significant model.

Examples of all this are:

in 1950 the Tiburtino district in Rome (group leader Mario Ridolfi and Ludovico Quaroni);
in 1951 the Spine Bianche district in Matera (Michele Valori, Aymonino);
of 1951 the INA Towers of viale Etiopia in Rome Mario Ridolfi;
from 1948 – 1952 Hotel-Rifugio Pirovano by Franco Albini in Breuil-Cervinia;
in 1956 the Rosta Nuova District in Reggio Emilia by Franco Albini, Franca Helg and Enea Manfredini;
of 1957 the Civil Hospital of Belluno by Enea Manfredini;
a villa of Ignazio Gardella in the Pavia countryside.
This habit of Italian architectural culture to recycle traditional forms brings the best architects to an important methodological choice, typical of the design custom of the past, which is to treat each project as an unrepeatable and isolated event and not as a program of a new organization of the city. Significant examples of this attitude are the aforementioned Torre Velasca in Milan by BBPR, the INA building by Franco Albini in Parma, the Cassa di Risparmio by Giovanni Michelucci in Florence, which represent “excellent originality” in the face of the general mediocrity of Italian architecture. The attitude derives from the difficulty of developing the issues of urbanization of the current city above a certain size, with the consequent inconsistency between architectural and urban consciousness. And the urbanistic question will explode with vehemence, under the weight of the first reconstruction and the building boom then of the sixties, which bring with them the building speculation. The citiesthey spread like wildfire without precise directives and the suburbs are dressed in greyness and chaos typical of paleo industrial settlements. In Italy there is no approach to urban problems, which is typical of the Modern Movement, architects can also have identified problems but can not find solutions and this leads to a crisis in Italian architectural culture.

Phenomena like the Neoliberty, of reaction to the lack of humanity of the International Style, can be framed in this area. On the one hand there is the desire to recover the ideas of familiarity and good grace of the architecture of the buildings of the early decades of the twentieth century, and on the other hand there is this self-closing in a return to the past, to avoid tackle current and urgent problems that appear to be unsolvable. Emblematic about it are the words of the British critic Reyner Banham who will identify the (“Italian spiritual retreat from modern architecture”). Thus a short-lived season was born in the late fifties, which refers to the formal themes of Art Nouveau, re-elaborating them in a more modern sense.

The main works to remember are:

1953-58 the Casa alle Zattere in Venice by Ignazio Gardella;
1953-56 the Bottega di Erasmo and Borsa Valori in Turin by Roberto Gabetti and Aimaro Isola,
1957 duplex apartments in Cameri (Novara) by L. Meneghetti, Vittorio Gregotti and Giotto Stoppino;
various buildings by Gae Aulenti, Guido Canella, and Pietro De Rossi in Milan.
The Brutalist instead born with Le Corbusier in Chandigarh, but can not be considered a real overcoming of the Modern Movement, but rather an ‘ evolution. In Italy he finds several followers: many have recognized his signs even in that unique event that is the aforementioned Torre Velasca in Milan, or in the disruptive plasticity of the exposed cement of the Church of the Autostrada del Sole by Giovanni Michelucci (1964); then, certainly, in the Istituto Marchiondi in Milan ofVittoriano Viganò (1957), in the houses of the Sorgane district in Florence, by Leonardo Ricci and others (1966), in the buildings for housing units in the Matteotti district of Terni by Giancarlo De Carlo (1971 – 74).

The latest trends
Other movements, more or less recent, represent, instead, the overcoming of the Modern Movement in Italy, because they bring new expressions and canons. They can be identified during the last 40 years:

the radical architecture of Superstudio founded in Florence by Adolfo Natalini in 1966, which is almost the “negation” of building construction and architectural space, where the positivist canons of the International Style seem to dissolve;
the High-Tech architecture masterfully expressed by Renzo Piano in the Beaubourg of Paris (1971 – 1979), whose revolutionary structure clearly highlights new themes and constructive details that become architectural details, linked to the metaphorical definition of the building through systems and technology;
the ‘ post-modern architecture, not born in Italy, although he had some advances in Guido Canella and Michele Achilli in the Municipality of Segrate (1963), which echoes a certain roundness Roman monumental and Paul Portuguese (Casa Baldi, 1960). The latter will become one of the most significant exponents in Italy of this movement, thanks to his work as a critic of architecture, the most important achievements were those of Aldo Rossi;
another movement, to be considered as a development of precedents, is neo-nationalism, whose pre-eminent figure in Italy was Aldo Rossi, to whom some jointly associate a sort of Neo-Novecento as in the Gallaratese district of Milan (1969 – 73);
the critical regionalism, was promoted in Italy by its main critic Kenneth Frampton with the publication of two articles in the magazines Casabella and Domus. One of the architects particularly sensitive to these topics was definitely Gino Valle.
other trends yet to be remembered are deconstructivism and modern pluralism, but for now they do not seem to have great references in Italy.

Source from Wikipedia