Italian Architecture Today: Variations on the Modern Style

by BRUNO ZEVI

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AFTER the liberation, at the end of the War, Italian architects set for themselves two major goals: to catch up with modern architecture in the rest of the world and to rediscover the Italian tradition pre-dating Fascism. They had to make up for lost time by assimilating — not passively, but critically — all that had been achieved in other countries during the years in which Italian architecture had been forced into barren isolation. Yet, at the same time, they wished to relate their new directions to the best, both recent and antique, which had lain concealed behind the megalomania of the Vittorio Emanuele Monument in Rome and the rhetorics of the Fascist style of building.

This operation had to be cultural and moral, as well as intellectual and artistic. Fortunately, there was some base on which to build. Throughout the Fascist period a small minority of architects had managed to resist the dictates of the regime even when it was most oppressive. The railroad station at Florence, the town of Sabaudia, the work of Giuseppe Terragm at Como, and the writings of Eduardo Persico and Giuseppe Pagano, were a positive beginning, from which the new generation of architects could move forward.

At the close of the War, much of Italy was a heap of rubble, the machinery of the State had broken down, and disorder, hunger and the weight of occupation by the liberating armies were crushing the country; yet the people showed an incredible vitality. They found ways to improvise, and, poor as they were, kept up their spirits; for they had fixed their eyes on the hope of a new life.

It was in this atmosphere that the first important postwar architectural competition was launched: the design for a monument at the Ardeatine Caves in Rome. The subject was a dramatic one. During the German occupation, a young anti-Faseist had thrown a bomb at a party of Nazi soldiers, killing thirty of them. In retaliation, the German authorities decreed the execution of ten Italians for every dead German. Within a few hours they collected over three hundred men from the prisons, out of their houses, even off the city streets, and took them out along the Via Ardeatina to some old natural caves. There they tied them up in groups of ten and machine-gunned them. Then, to hide the bodies, they blew up the caves. This massacre became the symbol both of the martyrdom and of the liberation of Italy. The monument which commemorates it is perhaps the most impressive of all those erected in Europe to the memory of the dead and the deported. The winning design was the work of a group of associates (Aprile, Calcaprina, Florentine, Gardelli and Perugini). A conception of great simplicity, it was chosen over many entries of the conventional type—with columns, arches, and a profusion of marble and impressive stairways. The selection of this chaste design was the first victory for the new Italian architecture.

Why is the Ardeatine Caves Monument (Plate 6) so fascinating? Above all because of the perfect harmony between the “naturalism” of the caves — left just as they collapsed onto the bodies of the victims — and the “classicism” of the great concrete form of the common sarcophagus which, though it is raised, seems to be pressing lightly down upon the three hundred tombs. Other elements act, as it were, as mediators between nature and art: the high wall along Via Ardeatina, the sculptor Mirko’s extraordinary gateway, its patterns of abstract bas-relief agonizingly contorted, the open space that separates the two approach walks, and finally the cross and the Star of David on the hilltop.

To create a form that is at the same time pure and dramatic is always difficult: an expert eye can discern that the horizontal lines of the sarcophagus are not exactly parallel, that they converge almost imperceptibly. It was designed in this way to avoid the optical distortions implicit in elementary volumes on such a large scale. The texture of the stone walls, the grain of the cement surfaces, the austere dimness of the interior, which is lit only through a ribbon-like open space between the lower wall and the roof slab and by a few points of artificial light sunk in the floor, are all in keeping with the basic conception. In spirit, in its feeling of controlled tension, the Ardeatine Monument may be compared to Rossellini’s great film Open City or to Carlo Levi’s book Christ Stopped at Eboli.

When another competition was held for the construction of the railroad station in Rome, a controversy flared up in which the very principles of modern architecture were at stake. Plans had been made for the new station under the Fascist regime, and the sides had already been built — in the worst monumental style, loaded with false marble arches. It had been intended to complete the front with a vast portico resting on pairs of fluted columns, and these columns were all ready to be erected when the Fascist collapse put a temporary stop to the whole scheme. The spokesmen of academic reaction now claimed that Italy, hungry and in ruins, could not afford the luxury of throwing away these columns, which, beautiful or not, at least provided some solution to the problem of how to complete the front of the station. But the competition was won by two modern designs, symbolic of the spirit of liberation from the oppressive style of the preceding decades.

To be sure, the Rome station (Plate 4) has certain faults: there is a lack of coherence between the long office block with its ribbon windows and the front part with its undulating roof; this roof, in itself very successful, is supported by columns which are none too convincing, and the gallery inside is a parallelepiped running contrary to the direction in which the public moves. But, all things considered, it is a work of high value which fully deserved the acclaim it immediately received all over the world. The brilliant and dynamic internal space of the entrance hall, its outline which continues that of the old Roman wall nearby, the shape of the windows and the aluminium ceilings of the gallery— all are positive figurative achievements. The cultural significance of this building is perhaps even greater than its aesthetic value. It marked a violent break with the past, and it seemed to represent the architectural aspect of the task that had to be performed all over Italy, in every field — the conscious refutation of the legacy of Fascism.

The architects of the Ardeatine Monument and the Rome station have unquestionably drawn both on the International Style of Le Corbusier, Gropius, and Mies van dor Rohe, and on the organic movement inspired by the genius of Frank Lloyd Wright. But they have also added something vital in their attempt to humanize and to qualify the cold common language of modern architecture. Our young architects have studied the whole modern movement intensively and systematically, from Gaudi to Mendelsohn, from Chicago to Scandinavia. Yet for any building in Italy, there is always the need to make the new fit into an urban and rural scene conditioned by the art of the past. This problem cannot be solved by resorting to stylistic compromises—which ruin the old and corrupt the new. It must be approached more subtly; modern architecture must be qualified, it must be enriched and made more flexible in its language, in order to be true to the spirit of the parent culture.

Every positive achievement of Italian architecture in recent years has been a response to this need. Consider, for example, one of the most inspired structures of Pier Luigi Nervi, the new Palazzetto dello Sport in Rome (Plate 7). Is it too fanciful to suggest that the ancestor of this small covered arena might be the Roman Pantheon? The Palazzetto has a very light dome of reinforced concrete which is balanced in space, while the antique Pantheon is supported on walls 26 feet thick. Statically the Palazzetto is the opposite of the Pantheon, but spatially it could be considered as its modern translation. A classical plan, based on the vault and the ribbed dome, is as far as Nervi’s structural theme goes, but it is for this very reason that he produces work so much more lyrical than that of many other more enterprising engineers. Because he accepts the limitations of his language, he is able to concentrate on a few motifs, and carry them to perfection.

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PASSING from the monumental to the more broadly social, we come to the work of the national housing agency, INA-Casn. A large number of competent architects were enlisted for a nationwide sevenyear program of intensive construction which began in 1948. The architectural tendencies to be found in these new housing developments reflect the whole range of Italian culture. On the one hand we find the “rationalists,” who conceive of a group of buildings as a series of light, white cubes arranged symmetrically, showing their structural frame and perhaps with an occasional tower for accent. On the other hand there are the “organicists,” who articulate the ground plan, concentrating more on the interplay of spaces within than on the external volumes. They may often use motifs from the rustic, anonymous and spontaneous architecture of the peasant villages, and adopt non-rectilinear forms and strong colors. The dangers inherent in the “rationalist” tendency are well known, in so far as they are typical of the International Style: coldness, a feeling of artificial geometry, a lack of human warmth. The weaknesses of the “organic” approach, of which the new Tiburtino quarter in Rome is the most appropriate example, are a straining after effects, a lack of technological precision and a product that is often more rural in character than urban.

One of the most interesting of the new housing projects is La Falchera in Turin (Plate 11), a happy blending of the rational and the organic schools designed by Astengo, Renaeeo and Rizzotti. Here there is a repeated motif, based on the form of an open “U,” but it is not simple or rectilinear. The spaces enclosed by the buildings have been imaginatively thought out, and are linked one to another in a systematic yet dynamic interdependence. Neither an academic coldness nor a romantic will has created these forms; they are the product not of a static architectural rule, but of an architectural process.

In the village of La Martella (Plate 10), near Matera — in the extreme south of Italy —Gorio, Valori and Quaroni have followed a similar procedure. For far too long modern architecture has been transporting the solutions reached for urban housing problems bodily into the country. In so doing, it has too often created something completely out of tune with the countryside and with the psychology of the country people. For La Martella a village was required which would be modern and yet acceptable to a society based upon a “community of families.”The groups of families are housed along a number of streets which converge on the square where the church and the local government and communal buildings are located. The houses are built of standardized materials, which however are assembled in a number of different ways, so that there is a great variety within the whole. The brightly colored ceramic decorations in the church are in keeping with the age-old artistic tastes of the South. There was the danger of becoming too “folk-arty, but La Martella avoids this fate. It goes as far as possible without disaster.

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THE need to temper and qualify modern architecture is evident in recent Italian museum design. We had been accustomed to museums conceived architecturally on a monumental scale, a shell into which the works of art were inserted at a later stage. But now this concept is being reversed: the works of art themselves create the architecture, dictating the spaces and prescribing the proportions of the walls. Each picture and statue is studied for the best possible view; it is then set in the necessary spatial “quantity.” The Palazzo Bianco and the Cathedral Treasure museums in Genoa (Plate 19), and the museum of the Sforza Castello in Milan (Plate 18), are the best examples of the new principles of design, by now generally accepted and adopted throughout the country. Exhibition pavilions, like those of the Carlo Scarpa in Venice, follow the same pattern.

The relationship between building and nature is a problem that must be faced not only in residential architecture but in all fields of design — even in industry. The Olivetti factory at Pozzuoli, designed by Luigi Cosenza, provides an excellent example, and we need only compare it with the Olivetti plant built twenty years ago at Ivrea, near Turin, to grasp the transition from the International Style to the more organic tendencies of today. The new factory (Plate 9) is situated in a scene of extraordinary beauty, between a rocky hillside and the sea. The ground plan is in the form of a cross, and from every workbench the employees can look out over the countryside. Facing the cross stands the office block, and, arranged in a descending arc are all the social services — the library, the infirmary, the social assistance office. Down on the street is the entrance porch. The closed-in atmosphere so typical of old industrial plants is thus completely avoided, with the practical consequence that production is higher at Pozzuoli than at Ivrea, in spite of the fact that industrial labor in Naples is less skilled than in Turin.

New problems and new approaches lead in turn to new forms. The Boys’ Town in Trieste (Plate 5) has nothing in common with the traditional “prisons” for delinquent children. These buildings, the work of Marcello D’Olivo, do not mortify the spirit, but stimulate it. The large pavilion which contains the dining hall was built before the very eyes of the children, and it was a wonderful adventure for them, a game on a grand scale. Psychoanalysts affirm that the architecture of Boys’ Town reflects a process of liberation similar to that which must be brought about in the minds of delinquent children. Thus modern architecture, having assimilated the structural and biological sciences over the last century, has now absorbed even the science of psychology.

The last building to be dealt with in this far too brief review is a little church at Collina (Plate 8) by Giovanni Michelucci, the designer of the Florence station. It is a new church, modern in structure and in its conception of space and volume, and yet it seems to be old—old, that is, in the way it belongs in the landscape and appears as a vivid detail in the continuity of the countryside. Modern architecture has made its mark by being functional; perhaps now it can also learn enchantment.

To re-enter the European and international field after the isolation imposed by Fascism; to revise the interpretation of the principles of modern architecture in the light of the world-wide experience that followed the first successes of the International Style; to reconcile the old and the new, fitting modern buildings into old settings; to base the process of design on internal spaces, rather than on volumes or surfaces as such; to take account of the varying conditions in different parts of the country; to assimilate the science of psychology and even to recognize the need for a modern mysticism — these have been the issues which postwar Italian architecture has had to face. In facing them, it has not been afraid to make mistakes. It has preferred to meet squarely the burning problems of today rather than rely on proven, but perhaps outdated, solutions. From this attitude springs the jumbled hodgepodge of some of our city building, the superficiality of many new styles, and the failure to reach an overall high standard in commercial construction. Yet, side by side with these many faults, there has been a very positive achievement. Cultural, historical and critical researches have been pursued with a stringency that has already borne fruit in the best architectural accomplishments of these postwar years.

Translated by Patrick Brasier-Creagh