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8/13/2019 Italian Architecture of the Twentieth Century Issues and Problems
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Italian Architecture of the Twentieth Century. Issues and problems.
The history of Italian architecture of Twentieth-century, crossed and structured by the almost total
identification between the same architecture and the city, was built layer by layer around some
problematic issues became long as many narratives places, elements of a real mythology, nowassumed by almost all of the disciplinary culture without substantial doubts come forward or move
ahead substantial reserves on it. The taking away from the excesses of the avant-garde, from which
the proposals that could be more easily metabolized were laboriously selected; the suffered
mediations between different research directions, the criticism of separation of town and
architecture present in the main theories developed within the Modern Movement, the necessity of
finding a national line against European and global architecture, are some of these problematic
issues. To these must be added more, such as the relationship between innovation and tradition; the
interactions between the fragment, seen as a symbolic form of the ancient, and the whole, the
interactions that permeate the work of a protagonist like Carlo Scarpa for example; the alternative
between generalism and specialisms; the distinction or the operating integration between
architecture and politics; the choice between autonomy and heteronomy of architecture; therelationship between this and the world of production; the continuity or discontinuity with the past,
or the question about the meaning of history, its ability to interact with the project by promoting the
precipitation of its components in a solid and complex solution or, on the contrary, its aim to offer
only as a measure of differentiation; the question about resources and the limits of a rational
conception of architecture.Starting from the issues just mentioned have been formed some recurring figures. Among these, a
dichotomic thought that goes through the opposition between progressives and reactionaries, that
manichean opposition does not allow distinctions and specifications, the idea of irreducible conflict
between different positions as an essential category of architecture, as in the famous Difficolt
politiche dellarchitettura italianaby Giulia Veronesi, and the corresponding adoption of the model
of the crisis as a constant result of the clash between opposing sides, as a hypothesis, basically
aesthetic, of the task of failure considered as a palingenetic fall, premise of a rebirth always deferred
to a future undetermined and to another place, identification of the value of an architecture with the
ideological choice that has been accomplished to think and realize. From here a few categories
including an idea of architecture as an expression of an abstract freedom, more than any bias; the
new as a result of a constant dialectic between the needs of settlement and representative born by
the industrial revolution, which needs to be given an architectural response, and environmental
preexistence, with the ambiguous compromise that they have produced; a marked limitation of
innovation in favor of a compromise very questionable and harmful, even if deemed necessary and
advanced with the tradition.
The discouraged and warning vision of Edoardo Persico; thedramatization of the condition of Italian architecture by Giuseppe Pagano; the palingenetic
exasperation of organicism introduced after World War II by Bruno Zevi; the constant and alarmed
reminder of the responsibilities of the architect by Ernesto Nathan Rogers; the angry and
perpetually dissatisfied look of Ludovico Quaroni; the tendency to apocalypticreadings that marked
the historical-critical vision of Manfredo Tafuri outline a climate of endemic pessimism in which
the architecture as a substance of thingshoped for, according to the definition of the author of Punto
e a capo dellarchitettura and Profezia dellarchitettura, proves to be a promise that cant be
maintained. The same idea of environmental preexistence which is similar, in many ways, to the
theories of Saverio Muratori, in his outline a middle-linebetween preservation and renewal for
example the Torre Velasca in Milan by BBPR or the Palazzo Sturzo by Muratori in Rome - has
created a planning approach oriented to incessant mediations that have taken energy to the newwhile at the same time have reduced, tentatively updating the mysterious and prophetic meaning -
from Alberto Savinio to Massimo Bontempelli of the traces, obvious or hidden, of the past.
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Between memorable students of Rogers - Aldo Rossi, Guido Canella, Gae Aulenti, Vittorio
Gregotti - only the last seems to finally be able to escape to mimetic historicism, or worse, to an
implicit and insistency rhetoric that is in the same idea of urban environment.
About pre-existing environmental something to be said about a very important precedents. The
problem of their foundational relationship with the new was already set up and solved in theTwenties and Thirties, in similar terms to more than one way, by Gustavo Giovannoni and Marcello
Piacentini. The urban design of the latter, especially, have always meant, even when involving
demolition or reconnections, within both accurate assessments as efficient in their outcomes, the
context in which interventions insisted. The same accuracy is also present in many rationalists
theoretical projects including Milano Verde by Albini, Gardella, Minoletti, Palanti Predaval,
Romano, which aroused the interest of the young Giulio Carlo Argan, and the Plan for a new
neighborhood in Ivrea, by Figini and Pollini. Piacentini, however, in his famousArchitettura doggi
in 1930, cleared, with one hundred and twenty-eight illustrations, its cultural policy which is to find
a middle-linebetween too pronounced innovative accelerations and an accentuated traditionalism. It
should be noted that in the selection of examples which he sets proves much more open to the new
as regards the international overview that as regards the Italian production.
A historiography centered on ideology and politics could not be a source of misunderstandings and
errors, of overstatement of situations, schools, occasions and of works at the same time due to
symmetrical underestimation of events and personalities. If the Fascism regime tried to bend
architecture to its propagandistic interests, during post-war period this precedent prevented,
especially to the Left wing parties, to prepare advanced discussion about the prospects of
architecture as an expression of society, except for one populist and short-term interest for housing
designed for so-called lower classes. The architectural neorealism was seen as an entirely new
attitude that wanted to claim, compared to the celebrative intent of fascist architecture, the potential
in the popular tradition of building, whose lexicon was revived against modern abstraction. In fact,
the neo-realism in Rome inherited the experience of the Twenties and Thirties, as noted by an
unprejudiced comparison between Garbatella, Montesacro and Tiburtino by Ridolfi and Quaroni. It
configures in many ways like a real inventionof a language that would incorporate rural ambience
deemed capable of evoking a strong community spirit, in reality profoundly anti-urban. This
language was more evocative than derived from real architecture as well as an artificial lexicon,
contradictory result of a simulation such as intellectual definitely inspired.
Continuing the personal listing of narrative places that need to undergo a revision there are other
issues to be considered. The return to order - the slogan of Jean Cocteau - which joined in Italy
artists like Ardengo Soffici, Carlo Carr and Gino Severini, who were convinced avant-garde,
should not be simply understood as a withdrawal to traditionalist positions, but as a realignmentofresearch on a wider and shared horizon of meaning. The avant garde led to a strong epistemological
break that caused the traumatic separation of language from its contents. The language had achieved
almost total autonomy, independent of the direction of which was to be the vehicle. In this way, the
artistic and architectural aspirations, but also literary, were entered in the obscurity of a radical
hermetismwhich excluded almost all of the public from understanding the works. In this way it was
created the need to recompose this dramatic gap reporting language and contents within the same
sphere. This is to give back to the artistic search capacity of communication that seemed to have
been placed permanently in crisis. This requirement also occurred in the architecture. Reflecting on
this problem it is clear that judging this realignment as a moral betrayal is inherently unfair. It is
certainly more correct, if necessary, to talk about a wrong choice, but certainly not guilty.
Besides the return to order the reason for which is perhaps found in the tragedy of the First World
War which seemed to have made with its destruction the resetting desire of the avant-garde. There
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are other narrative places to be rethought entirely. The fact that during the Ventennio exemplary
architecture have been realized, for example, recognized only if one assumed a silent opposition to
Fascism by their authors, which is often not true, as in the case of the Casa del Fascio in Como by
Giuseppe Terragni and the Palazzo dei Congressi located in the Eur, in Rome, by Adalberto Libera.
Coming to a recent season, the Seventies, the problems of large residential projects of this period,
inspired and supported by the Left, whose symbol is the Corviale, in Rome, by Mario Fiorentino,were evaluated with an excessive indulgence respect to the significant functional and technical
inadequacy that these neighborhoods had.
The briefly remembered distortions not only concerned with general issues. About topics closest to
the specific problems of projective cultures should be to recall some aspects of the Italian
architecture of the last century on which to reflect. For decades, creative events such as those of
Mario Ridolfi, together with theoretical elaborations such as the proposals advanced in the pages of
Casabella by Ernesto Nathan Rogers, or by Ludovico Quaroni, the master in dubitative
methodology, in memorable books and in a half-a-century teaching, were somehow exploited, even
unknowingly, to obscure other routes of rare qualities architectural such as those undertaken by
irregular shapes, or difficult to fit in a specific ideological contexts, such as Gi Ponti, LucianoBaldessari, Luigi Moretti, Marcello D'Olivo, Maurizio Sacripanti, Giuseppe Vaccaro, Giuseppe
Nicolosi. Zevis totalizing extremism was the origin of culture wars in which aggressive intentions
as summary overtake significantly attenuated the ability to share the reasons for controversy often
in themselves necessary. The total exclusion of the works of protagonists as Vittorio Gregotti, Aldo
Rossi, Giorgio Grassi from his reading of contemporary architecture was born. Zevis aversion to
Postmodern, explained in its unyielding opposition to Paolo Portoghesi is not justifiable in the form
it took, as well as his penchant for operative criticismwas fought with a schematic equally hard and
final by Manfredo Tafuri. Overlooking here the numerous damnatio memoriae- just remembering
about the almost total cancellation which felt the theoretical work and planning of Saverio Muratori
following a confrontation in the Faculty of Architecture in Rome between the author of the Sede
Nazionale della Democrazia Cristiana in the Eur and Bruno Zevi, just returned from Venice it
could be easy to compile a long list of removed events, remarkable architectures condemned to
oblivion, the indecisive momentous elected as epochal, modest experience all things regarded as
experiences of international importance. Meanwhile, the real meaning of architecture created by the
central figures such as, for example, Giuseppe Samon, Giancarlo De Carlo, and the same Rogers
and Quaroni does not seem to build a real source of interest, these figures being considered more
important for their intellectuals role than for the project research, with results usually remarkable,
that they have done for several decades. In some ways only the academic culture is considered a
solid and durable reference point, yet the architectonic results of this culture are in fact considered
worthy to be explored critically. Paradoxically, a similar fate touches to the architecture that could
be defined antiacademic, such as those produced by radical architects such as Alessandro Mendini,Andrea Branzi, Gianni Pettena, appreciated more for their experimental and unconventional nature
than for their intrinsic architectural content. In this picture remain true historical-critical mysteries
to solve. They include the role of the movement of Comunit, under the leadership of Adriano
Olivetti promoted some important operations as the agricultural village La Martella, not far from
Matera. What needs to be fully understood is the nature at the same time democratic and elitist
vision of Olivetti, which ends up placing the proposed solutions, inspired by a critical illuminism,
that takes care of the problems he wants to give an answer, above and beyond the urban situations
and social conditions on which such a vision acts. The solutions proposed by members of the
Comunit are moving in more ways than actually fell from above, as if the people involved in these
experiments were regarded not as subjects dialoguing, but as privileged objects of reformist
advanced engineering. Another issue to investigate is to find a reason for the less of support thatshould be given by the Left wing parties, beyond the seeming acceptance, in the early Sixties to the
innovative hypotheses on business centers, places of urban sociabilitystill largely incomplete and
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indeterminate in its changing between openings and closings in the enclosure of neighborhoods
with no connections to the territory. Another theoretical problem on which Italian architecture is
laterally interested in is the technique. Perhaps because of the influence in Twentieth century of the
Croce's idealism, the question of the meaning of the technical universe in modern society - an issue
that was central in Germany, as the works of Martin Heidegger and Romano Guardini remember -
is so sporadic and marginal.Just to make clear this lack of interest just think that it took at leasttwenty years for the work of Renzo Piano, strongly supported by an original and humanistic idea ofthe technique, far from didactic and self-celebrative overexposure of high-tech, it was recognized
by the Italian critics as a high contribution to one of the most complex problems, not only
architectural, of the Twentieth century.
To better understand the relationship between the current problems of Italian architecture, seen in
historical perspective that was quickly resumed, the picture overall architecture, should at this point
to recall some profound and irreversible changes that have occurred over the last twenty years in
architecture. They were caused by the convergence of three phenomena whose importance is not yet
fully evaluable, but which are certainly of great importance. The first is the advent of globalization,
which has redefined the foundations of the political, economic and cultural logics of the world,sparking a tough competition not only between states but also between metropolises, each of which
engaged, such Shanghai for example, to achieve global leadership. The second is the information
revolution, which had as its main effect not only the transition, as written by Kurt Forster, from the
Vitruvian tectonic paradigm - the trilithic paradigm - a construct based on the continuity of the
bearing and wrapping surfaces - but also a new way to communicate, as can occur with the rise of
social networks, one of the most obvious consequences of the birth of the network. Internet is the
context within a new form of criticism that is expressed in several blogsdevoted to architecture and
in variouspress letterthat deal with current issues is born and has spread to. Even sites that present
the works that many architects or architectural firms help to determine a new way to read and to
decode what is happening today in architecture. It is still too early to assess the role of criticism in
the network, which is in any case, a phenomenon which gives particular attention. The third is the
transition from production of material goods to those intangibles, or the affirmation of culture and
art as the main sites of processing of mentalities and collective expectations. These three changes
are part of a more pronounced speeding information flow, which is added to a reduction to the
presentthis even more explicit every day, a crush on the most topical in turn made more active by a
typical process of globalization, for which everything tends to be a generalization that results in the
full abstraction. The speeding up of information, the reduction to the present and abstraction are the
factors that prevent those who want to understand what happens to build that critical distancewhich
from years firmly speaks Vittorio Gregotti. The time needed to see things from perspectives that
allow to analyze and evaluate the effect was reduced to defeat. For that you need to know how to
locate where you want to be found, using a sort of sixth sensethat lets you do instant collimation, orthat makes possible to make quick connections between too distant and different phenomena and
elements.
In light of this who writes hopes they will be made in the near future three operations related to
each other. The first is to promote a strategy of Italian architecture of the Twentieth century finally
conceived outside of the dual pattern, inspired by an ideological view of what happened, who
dominated the second half of the century. The historical writing should take note of the end of a
conception of Italian architecture as a result of a sort of endless civil warthat has seen and sees two
factions fight with all lawful and unlawful means.Modernity has not been a monolithic technical
and operational entity nor had another modernity as an antagonist. It looks increasingly as the
interaction of different viewpoints that have their own intrinsic legitimacy and which may wellcoexist. The completely absorbing idea that oneis the search direction can make the contents higher
and the programs more advanced can no longer be sustained. It must be replaced by a pluralistic
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vision which, if it cant be placed the different positions on the same level, must still be able to note
any equivalence and the same right to exist disciplinary conflicting interpretations of them.
The second operation which should be done has to do with the problem of the simplification of issue
set by cultural logic and global information. For example, the articulation between the national
situation and regional identity of the Italian architecture is too complex to be able to beimplemented at the level of global issues, dominated today by a relationship between sustainability
and technology which incidentally probably can find a key in the theories of declineessential to be
reset in a more complex, conscious and effective terms. A historiography of Italian architecture in
which prevails the memory instead of researching how innovative ideas can find a space and a
verification, a memory that cant tend to inject toxins of nostalgia into the disciplinary culture, and
self-satisfaction of excuses in retrospect, is not able to put in a position a marginal percentage
architecture like that Italian to enter with equal chances of iterations and exchanges in the global
picture.
In fact, memory cant be seen merely as a mental placeand a size of the spirit that make those who
have the ability and willingness to remember more aware and responsible, more sensitive to thecomplex texture of reality. The memory is really important if its the space of the structural reading
of how things were formed. This is a not sentimental or evocative reading but intended to
reconstruct the processes by which places and architectures have defined their identity.
The need for simplified issue is the premise for the third operation, the more difficult. It is urgent to
provide as soon as you can to find in Italian architecture not more than three priorities, become real
in clear and instantly comprehensible problems. Totranslatethe historic heritage in contemporary
languages rescued from its tendency to ebb to the reassuring and conventional idea of the past; to
create a program of innovative architectural and urban interventions by renouncing the possible
variants of the current theories of pre-existing environmental; to facilitate the simultaneous presence
of a plurality of conflicting trends, without thinking that one direction of research should be
dominant, outline a program that might be worth achieving. If it is true, as Charles Baudelaire said
that the criticism - and the culture in general - should be partial, passionate and political, is also
true that these characters do not necessarily have to belong to a single array. Pending this new story,
is no longer considered within a binary paradigm, intended as a comparison war for the conquest of
hegemony, but as an intentional description of conflict and operating strategies of coexistencemust
be hoped in a creative season that find a happiness of doing far from the closed and worried
atmosphere that permeated the narrative places of Italian architecture of the Twentieth century.
Franco Purini