| Although an Arts and Crafts exhibition was organized in 1902 in Turin, which marked the official entry of Italy into the international Art Nouveau movement (‘stile Liberty’ is the name usually employed in Italy), in reality the crisis of historicism had its beginnings more than thirty years earlier in the works of Camillo Boito and Alessandro Antonelli. In the quest for a rational architecture Boito’s contribution was above all in critical and theoretical speculation, while Antonelli was given to structural reflection.
Certainly the most important Milanese architects before 1914 were two pupils of Boito: Gaetano Moretti and Giuseppe Sommaruga. In Moretti’s finest work, the Central Electricity Station of Trezzo d’Adda, the influence of Art Nouveau is indirect, and it is more a naturalist-romantic simplification which characterizes the formal language. Sommaruga interpreted Art Nouveau decoration in strongly sculptural terms, intermingled with Neo-Renaissance influences, as seen in his Palazzo Castiglioni in Milan (1900–3) and numerous other houses in Bergamo, Milan and Piedmont from the same period.
The other two important representatives of Italian Art Nouveau, Ernesto Basile and Raimondo D’Aronco, had different origins. Basile, who was the son of Gian Battista Basile, the most important Sicilian architect of the second half of the 19th century, combined with extraordinary refinement an Art Nouveau taste with his Neo-Norman formal approach. D’Aronco was Venetian and directly influenced by Otto Wagner. He was the protagonist of the Turin Exhibition of 1902 and afterwards built various buildings of unusually modern conception in Turkey, including the Santoro House in Istanbul (1908).
Ulisse Stacchini (designer of the Milan Central Station, won in competition in 1906), Ernesto Pirovano, Giovanni Michelazzi, Pietro Fenoglio and Annibale Rigatti were, in addition, the most important exponents of the widespread renewal movement in which the most important personality of architectural Futurism, Antonio Sant’Elia, had his roots.
In contrast to North Italy, Rome’s most important architects, such as Guglielmo Calderini or Cesare Bazzani (the creator of the Museo d’Arte Moderna built for the major exhibition of 1911) remained firmly historicist in approach. The activity of Gino Coppedè, who was one of the most imaginative exponents of late eclecticism, also deserves mention.
The Futurist episode was, at least in architecture, rather more diverse and long-lived than legend would have it. Between 1909, the year of Marinetti’s ‘Manifeste du futurisme’ and 1914, when the manifesto ‘L’architettura futurista’ appeared, lie not only five years, but also numerous important events, including the establishment of the friendship of Sant’Elia and Chiattone, both of whom were represented in the 1914 ‘Nuove Tendenze’ (New Tendencies) exhibition. Architectural Futurism had an influence, after this first explosive inroad, on every exhibition through the 1930s. One should cite in this regard Fillia (Luigi Colombo), Virgilio Marchi, Enrico Prampolini, and Fortunato Depero (who created the ‘futurist’ pavilion at the Monza Biennale of 1927), Nicolà Diulgheroff and Ottorino Aloisio, as well as the extraordinary Interno futurista of Ivo Pannaggi of 1925.
The Futurist strain continued as an impetus to an authentic avant garde which ran parallel to the concept of a ‘return to order’ which was a common attitude after World War I, even among the Italian modernists. Between 1919 and 1926 (the year of the foundation of the modernist association Gruppo 7), Italian culture in general—from the literary journal La Ronda to Valori Plastici, the magazine of the new visual culture—revealed a tendency to regard the romantic avant garde of the pre-war years as obsolete and to rally behind a new nationalistic neo-classicism.
The Milan architects Giovanni Muzio, Arpago Novello, Giuseppe de Finetti and Gio Ponti especially worked in this direction, although with different accents. In 1923 Muzio built the Ca’brutta in the Via Moscova in Milan, a building which in formal terms paid homage to Giorgio de Chirico’s ‘Pittura metafisica’. Also in Milan, in 1925 Finetti designed the Casa della Meridiana, a building rich in reminiscences of Loos.
In the same period in Rome, Pietro Aschieri, Alessandro Limongelli and Gino Capponi sought the way to a hesitant renewal. In 1928, Adalberto Libera and Gaetano Minucci organized in Rome the first ‘Esposizione dell’architettura razionale’, through which medium the young Rationalists entered into competition with academic architects for the official favour of the Fascist regime. A decision was, in any case, not to be reached until ten years later; although the academicians, with Piacentini at their head, always enjoyed institutional support, the regime did not adopt a repressive stance towards the Rationalists until 1937 (M.I.A.R.).
Likewise in 1928, an exhibition held in Turin to mark the tenth anniversary of victory in World War I provided experimental possibilities for young architects, including Giuseppe Pagano and Levi Montalcini (who built the Gualino office building in 1929), Alberto Sartoris and Lavinia Perona. They all joined together to form the Group of Six, led by Edoardo Persico. Moreover 1928 was also the year of Terragni’s Novocomum in Como, the first significant Rationalist building in Italy.
Until 1936 the cultural scene was tense, due to the rivalry of the moderately modern Novecento Italiano and Rationalism. The 1930 exhibition in Monza was dominated by the Novecento, but the Rationalists were represented by the Casa Elettrica of Figini, Pollini, and Bottoni. In Milan in 1933, the First Triennale was held in a building designed by Muzio, in which the Rationalists and the ‘Novecentists’ were equally represented. Especially to be noted are the graphic arts hall by Muzio and Sironi and the Press Pavilion by the Rationalist Baldessari. In 1932, the Roman ‘Mostra della rivoluzione fascista’ was put on in an exceptional pavilion by Sironi and Terragni, and in 1934 the Salon of Air Travel presented one of the most brilliant products of Rationalism: the Hall of the Gold Medals by Persico and Nizzoli. The Second Milan Triennale of 1936, directed by Ponti and Pagano, was the great Triennale of Rationalism.
Between 1932 and 1936 the most important buildings of Italian Rationalism were erected: the buildings for Olivetti by Figini and Pollini (who, along with Terragni and Libera, were the only members of Gruppo 7 to remain true to the principles of modernist architecture); the Parker Company by Persico and Nizzoli; the first of Albini’s refined buildings; the works of the Como group (Pietro Lingeri, Cesare Cattaneo and Gianni Mantero); and above all the important works of Terragni. In 1934, Michelucci’s group won the competition for the Santa Maria Novella Station in Florence.
Only a few noteworthy Rationalist buildings were realized in Rome before 1936: the Post Office in the Quartiere Nomentano (1932) and the House in the Via Valentino by Ridolfi, as well as the Justice Building by Quaroni and Muratori; in addition there were the urban planning projects for the new towns of Pontinia (1933) by Piccinato and Sabaudia (1936) by Quaroni.
The general atmosphere worsened after 1936 and the academicians (of whom many were members of the exhausted Novecento movement) again gained the upper hand.
In the Rationalist camp the BBPR group (Banfi, Belgiojoso, Peressutti and Rogers), as well as Gardella and Mollino, effected a sort of critical Rationalism which showed a great sensitivity to problems of history and local tradition. In 1937, Adriano Olivetti (the clear-sighted industrialist of great importance in the history of Italian architecture, design and urbanism) entrusted the BBPR group, together with Bolloni, Figini and Pollini, with the planning of the Aosta valley. In 1938, the Milan Rationalists prepared the plan for the model quarter Milano Verde. Muzio built the Bonaiti and Malugani houses in Milan (1935–6) in which he introduced Italy to the taste of Bonatz and Fahrenkamp, while in his building for the Montecatini Company in Milan, Ponti turned to a moderate Rationalism. The airline terminals at Orbetello were realized by Nervi in 1940–3.
After the government ordered the journal Casabella-continuittà—the most important organ of Italian Rationalism—to cease publication, nearly the entire group of Rationalists joined the political underground. Raffaello Giolli, Gian Luigi Banfi and Giuseppe Pagano were arrested and deported to German camps, where they died in 1945: what had seemed a ‘question of style’ became a question of freedom and death.
The reconstruction after World War II united the Rationalists around a policy of strong continuity with pre-war tradition. In Milan, BBPR built the memorial for the victims of the concentration camps (1946). The Seventh Milan Triennale and the experimental residential quarter QT8, built in conjunction with it, are representative of the hopes of those years, and the inclination to a new relationship between Italy’s architectural culture and the realities of the day. The architectonic neo-realism of the following years developed in reaction to the disappointment of the left’s defeat in the provincial elections of 1948 and the cultural bureaucratization of the Italian Communist Party, which screened itself from contemporary avant-garde culture. This found expression in the work of Mario Ridolfi in Rome, the ideology of the ‘commune’ and the new interest in spontaneous architecture, in Scandinavian neo-empiricism and in the contradictions of the ‘milieu’.
The INA-Casa Tiburtino quarter in Rome (a sort of manifesto of architectural neo-realism), the ‘Case a torre’ in the Viale Etiopia, also in Rome, by Ridolfi, the village of La Martella near Matera by Quaroni, and the Borsalino houses in Alessandria by Gardella were all realized in the 1950s. In addition to his beautiful museums (Palazzo Bianco in Genoa, 1951), Franco Albini built the INA Building in Parma (likewise 1951) which for twenty years served as a model for the architecture of the region.
The discussion of the internal conflicts of Rationalism, and especially its relationship to tradition, was opened in the second half of the 1950s, first by young architects (Roberto Gabetti, Vittorio Gregotti, Aimaro Oreglia D’Isola, Giuseppe Raineri), then also by Gardella (Casa alle Zattere in Venice, 1957), Albini (Museo del Tesoro di San Lorenzo in Genoa, 1954–6; and La Rinascente Department Store in Rome, 1957–62) and finally by the BBPR group (the Torre Velasca in Milan, 1954–8).
At the same time a middle generation (Marco Zanuso, Vico Magistretti, Gigi Chessa, Vittoriano Viganò, Ezio Segrélli, Marcello D’Olivo, Angelo Mangiarotti) developed an interest in industrial production and its ideological and practical implications for buildings. Luigi Cosenza built a noteworthy industrial complex for Olivetti (1955) in Naples. Nervi, Morandi and Zorzi also offered interesting constructional experiments. The Pirelli skyscraper in Milan by Gio Ponti and others, built in 1956–8, was typical of a modernistic formalism which had become rather widespread.
The end of the 1950s was characterized by a double crisis. On the one hand a new interest in urban problems developed, especially with the book L’urbanistica e l’avvenire della città (‘Urbanism and the future of the city’, 1959) by Samonà (the founder of the architectural school in Florence). On the other hand there was a shift in the relationship between ideological obligation and language in favour of a greater concentration on questions specific to the architectural discipline.
The competition for the San Giuliano quarter across from Venice was held in 1959, and Quaroni submitted a project based on the problem of hierarchies in the planning of the city. The 1961 competition for the administrative centre of the city of Turin elicited many architecturally important and engaged contributions, as did the later competition (1967) for the extension of the Chamber of Deputies in Rome.
The important protagonists of the 1960s were Leonardo Ricci, who worked with the theme of informality, Maurizio Sacripanti with his interest in the expressive means of advanced technologies, Giovanni Michelucci, who built the Church of San Giovanni Battista (1960–3) on the Autostrada del Sole (motorway) near Florence, and not least Carlo Scarpa, who had already realized his famous pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1956 and now continued with his exceptional remodelling of museums (Palermo, Verona, Venice). Several younger architects were also confirmed in the 1960s: Gino Valle, who created a series of industrial buildings in Pordenone (1961), Aymonino, Vittorio Gregotti, Gae Aulenti, Rossi and Guido Canella.
The Triennale of Free Time, held in Milan in 1964, once again took up problems of architecture after three successive Triennales had focused on questions of design.
In 1966 two books were published which were to have considerable influence: Il territorio dell’architettura by Vittorio Gregotti and L’Architettura della città by Aldo Rossi (Rational architecture).
Earlier confidence in a limitless progress ended with the onset of the world-wide economic crisis of the late 1960s and with the crisis of ideals which culminated in the movements of 1968.
The architecture of the 1970s sought to provide a series of answers to this deep crisis. On the one hand there developed a new avant garde (Superstudio, Archizoom, Ettore Sottsass) which rejected Rationalism and advocated a new creativity, while on the other hand a group of young architects in the circle of the Istituto Universitario di Architettura in Venice proposed a reconsideration of the traditional principles of urban form. Aymonino, Rossi, Polesello, and Semerani were its most important proponents. A further group maintained a strong urban planning position which concentrated essentially on the management and conservation of the existing urban fabric.
Important testing grounds for these various tendencies were offered in the great competitions for new university complexes which were held in the early 1970s (Florence, 1971; Cagliari, 1972; Cosenza, 1973).
Giancarlo De Carlo has assumed a special position in recent Italian architecture. He has concentrated his efforts principally on the city of Urbino, whose development he has determined not only as a planner but also with built work of a noteworthy standard of architectural quality.
Among the youngest architects one should cite Emilio Battisti, Franco Purini, Pierluigi Nicolin and Emilio Puglielli, whose grounding is the school of Gregotti, as well as Massimo Scolari, Giorgio Grassi, Umberto Siola and Salvatore Bisogni, who take Rossi’s work as a starting point.
Lampugnani, Vittorio Magnago, Encyclopedia of 20th century architecture, Thames and Hudson, 1986 |
