Neo-rationalism

After World War II, a new rationalist movement emerged in architecture, claiming inspiration from both the Enlightenment and early-20th-century rationalists. Like the earlier rationalists, the movement, known as the Tendenza, was centered in Italy. Practitioners include Carlo Aymonino (1926–2010), Aldo Rossi (1931–97), and Giorgio Grassi. The Italian design magazine Casabella featured the work of these architects and theorists. The work of architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri influenced the movement, and the University Iuav of Venice emerged as a center of the Tendenza after Tafuri became chair of Architecture History in 1968. et seq. A Tendenza exhibition was organized for the 1973 Milan Triennale.

Rossi’s book L’architettura della città, published in 1966, and translated into English as The Architecture of the City in 1982, explored several of the ideas that inform Neo-rationalism. In seeking to develop an understanding of the city beyond simple functionalism, Rossi revives the idea of typology, following from Quatremère de Quincy, as a method for understanding buildings, as well as the larger city. He also writes of the importance of monuments as expressions of the collective memory of the city, and the idea of place as an expression of both physical reality and history.

Architects such as Leon Krier, Maurice Culot, and Demetri Porphyrios took Rossi’s ideas to their logical conclusion with a revival of Classical Architecture and Traditional Urbanism. Krier’s witty critique of Modernism, often in the form of cartoons, and Porphyrios’s well crafted philosophical arguments, such as “Classicism is not a Style”, won over a small but talented group of architects to the classical point of view. Organizations such as the Traditional Architecture Group at the RIBA, and the Institute of Classical Architecture attest to their growing number, but mask the Rationalist origins.

In Germany, Oswald Mathias Ungers became the leading practitioner of German rationalism from the mid-1960s. Ungers influenced a younger generation of German architects, including Hans Kollhoff, Max Dudler, and Christoph Mäckler.

The term architectural Neorealism indicates an architectural current of Italian rationalism after World War II.

The trend can be identified as the first reaction to the Modern Movement in architecture, which develops in Italy, and is linked to the broader cultural movement defined precisely Neorealism, which had its development in the years immediately following the end of the Second World War.

Architecture begins to abandon the Neoclassicism simplified and monumentalism of twenty years fascist; arose the architectural Neorealism, 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.

Characters
Neorealist research is focused on a new rationality of building, which looks to the past, revealing the ever-current theme, as several critics have identified (Zevi, Benevolo, Purini etc.), a complex of Italian architecture in relation to its tradition and of the identity that derives from it. We want to recreate the conditions, the environment, the architectural space, the way of living, which in the main achievements, which are the public ones of the INA-House, are linked to the equilibrium of village life.

It is in this perspective that the experiment of the Ina-casa Tiburtino neighborhood in Rome starts, to which Michele Valori, a great experimenter in residential construction, participates in the team led by Quaroni and Ridolfi (1950). The five-storey collective houses that Valori offers at Tiburtino present an articulated arrangement of blocks that allows the variety of points of view and the creation of small-scale public spaces, capable of suggesting the vitality and spontaneity of the village, one of the objectives that the group of Quaroni and Ridolfi had set for itself.

«The architects who worked in Rome in the first post-war years», Cappelli writes, «have tried to avoid forms and images associated with the past Fascist regime, banning references to ancient Rome, classicism and neoclassicism, but also Futurism and rationalist languages more similar to European avant-gardes “. This push for renewal will lead to the opening of a new language, to be defined through the indication of some works to which a seminal value is attributed: the Tiburtino district (1949-54), the Valco San Paolo district (1949-50), the Tuscolano (1950-52), the horizontal dwelling unit (1950-54), the Fosse Ardeatine (1945-49), the buildings of the Fifties, until reaching the Corviale district (1972-82).

The construction between 1951 and 1954 of the village of La Martella, a very large urban project not far from the city of Matera, represents a key moment in the history of neorealist architecture and perhaps its highest result. Adriano Olivetti is the person who will give more impetus to the question of the rehabilitation of the Sassi materani. Michele Valori will participate in this project, still called by Quaroni, with Federico Gorio, Lugli, and Michele Agati. Also in those years it is worth mentioning the national competition for the construction of the rural village of Torre Spagnola (Matera, 1954), banned by UNRRA Casas, to whomValori will participate with Gorio. The project, which will win the first prize, consists of two series of houses in line that create as many adjacent enclosures. The planimetric layout closed with the entrances of the lodgings facing the inside of the perimeter, is aimed at creating a civic space within which the collective life of the village takes place. Within this, there are common services, designed to serve also the neighboring farmhouses. At the center of the parish church, defined by Leonardo Benevolo “the best invention of all Italian neorealism” as the hub of the community. The roads are for pedestrians, farm cars and cars. In these first projects Michele Valori, as well as in the following ones that will commit him until the mid-sixties, he realizes residential systems in which the main reasons of modern civilization respect the moral, taste and life of society, and puts its greatest attention in giving users a architecture that is civilization.

There is, therefore, a work on the compositional coherence of the materials, the technological choices, the architectural and constructive details, the sociological and psychological interpretations of the existing and historical built environment. His teachers are Ignazio Gardella, Michele Valori, Mario Ridolfi, Carlo Aymonino, Ludovico Quaroni, Giovanni Michelucci, although the latter also spans other trends.

Other examples of this are:

in 1950 the Tiburtino district in Rome (group leader Ridolfi and Quaroni);
from 1950 – 1960 several projects Michele values such as multi-storey residences in the neighborhood Tiburtino in Rome (1949/54), the complex UNRRA Casas (Catania 1949/59), the development of the urban plan of the village La Martella in Matera (1952 / 54), the complex of the IACP Corviale area in Rome, also created by Valori together with Mario Fiorentino and in the residential buildings of Eur in Rome (1955/59), the INA Casa neighborhood in Trapani (1957/63), in the for the building of Poggio Ameno (1961/64), to the trials of public housing that see Michele Valorialongside architects such as Ludovico Quaroni and Mario Ridolfi, for the reconstruction after the world war, up to the troubled definition of the new master plan of Rome (1955/1962)
of 1952 the project for the Churches of San Giovanni Bosco in Cinecittà (Michele Valori)
in 1951 the Spine Bianche district in Matera (Carlo Aymonino and Michele Valori);
of 1951 the INA Towers – Insurance in viale Etiopia in Rome (Mario Ridolfi);
of 1955- 59 residential buildings at the Eur- Rome (Michele Valori)
of 1959 -60 residential neighborhoods in Catania, Messina, Caltanissetta (Michele Valori)
The refuge of Franco Albini in Cervinia;
of 1955 – 59 building of Viale dell’Umanesimo, Rome (Michele Valori, in coll.)
a villa of Ignazio Gardella in the Pavese countryside;
Quarter INA-Casa Via Tiburtina to: Ludovico Quaroni, Mario Ridolfi, Carlo Aymonino, Carlo Chiarini, Mario Fiorentino, Federico Gorio, Maurizio Lanza, Sergio Lenci, Piero Maria Lugli, Carlo Pomegranates, Giancarlo Menichetti, Giulio Rinaldi, Michael Values;
District Valco San Paolo of: Mario De Renzi and Saverio Muratori, Eugenio Montuori, Mario Paniconi, Giulio Pediconi, Fernando Puccioni;
District Tuscolano of: Mario De Renzi, Lucio Cambellotti, Francesco Fariello, Adalberto Libera, Saverio Muratori, Giuseppe Perugini, Giulio Roisecco, Dante Tassotti, Luigi Vagnetti;
Horizontal dwelling unit of: Adalberto Libera;
Mausoleum of the Fosse Ardeatine of: In April, Cino Calcaprina, Aldo Cardelli, Uga De Plaisant, Mario Fiorentino, Giuseppe Perugini.

Source from Wikipedia