Beautypically

According to JUSTINSHOES, the numerous translations published by our publishers are a sign of how far the horizon within which Italian architects operate has widened. Often, however, our judgment on foreign experiences tends to generalize negative considerations pertinent to the state of public construction and urban planning in our country, and underestimate certain results achieved elsewhere which, even if they are partial, must be commensurate with the complexity and novelty of the problems to be addressed. face up to. Some European researches did not collect from us the following that was to be expected, especially when they corresponded to contents similar to those that interested us. Of the so-called “brutalism”, the most promising trend manifested in recent years, and anticipations of which can also be traced in the work of our designers (perhaps even in some pre-war buildings in Gardella) for a long time almost the only Italian examples remained, in Milan, the church of the Madonna of the poor in Figini and Pollini and the institute Marchiondi by V. Viganò. Exchanges with foreign countries have, however, greatly increased, as demonstrated by the teaching entrusted to T. Maldonado and A. Rossi at the Zurich Polytechnic at the University of Bologna and the assignments from other countries for our designers, to begin with the one who is internationally best known, PL Nervi. While he continued to work intensely in Italy, building large industrial and sports facilities and exceptional buildings – from the Pirelli skyscraper, in collaboration with Ponti, A. Rosselli and others, at the papal audience hall in the Vatican – Nervi built the Unesco headquarters in Paris with M. Breuer and BH Zehrfuss and the Watergate complex with Moretti in Washington, also famous for the political events that began there. In the USA, where our architects are frequently invited to teach for some time, A. Giurgola and P. Soleri work permanently. Another designer of very interesting structures, Morandi, to whom we owe the underground exhibition hall in Turin, the Alitalia hangars in Fiumicino, the viaduct over the Polcevera in Genoa, is the author of the bridge about 9 kilometers long in Maracaibo in Venezuela. In the Hansaviertel district in Berlin, one of the houses designed by architects of various nationalities for the Interbau exhibition is by L. Baldessari; and always in Germany, Bega built offices for the Springer publisher. Projects have been prepared for a museum in Cairo by Albini, for the political center of Tunis by Quaroni, for the Conference Hall in Amman by Portoghesi; and it could be considered symptomatic that on our part, with regard to developing countries where many Italian companies operate, the most qualified commitment is aimed at interventions of this kind rather than initiatives destined to directly affect the daily life of those populations. Also a building for services of an exceptional nature, but very different in its architectural design, which refers to industrial buildings not only in technology, it is the center for research and cultural events which, in the heart of Paris, stands out in the Beaubourg area and which was designed by R.

Mutually, various projects for the Italy have been carried out abroad, mainly on behalf of governments or entities of other countries. Among the offices of diplomatic representations and foreign institutions in the capital, the Danish Cultural Institute in Valle Giulia by Kay Fisker and the British embassy in Porta Pia by Sir B. Spence deserve to be noted. When the assignment came from Italian clients, the projects were almost never realized; the Mondadori offices in Segrate near Milan are an exception, for which O. Niemeyer has taken typical solutions from Brasilia. The ideas of K. Tange for Bologna were not implemented, nor the projects for churches and other buildings of A. Aalto, who however built the Finnish pavilion at the Venice Biennale, where the Dutch one was designed by G. Rietveld. In Venice itself, foreigners only carried out tasks entrusted by their compatriots, and instead both the aforementioned Masieri Memorial by FL Wright, a congress palace by L. Kahn and the hospital of Le Corbusier remained on paper. Like so many other Lecorbusian proposals, this one too was presented in provocatively accentuated terms, such as to fuel the reactions that prevented it from being realized, but precisely the polemical charge enriches it with ideas that indicate an orientation to follow; the use of modern construction techniques at the service of a typological organization that is as original as it is not at all complicated, and the agreement of the project for such a new and large building with the pre-existing environment, in a city such as Venice, they seem to insist on the need for Italian architects to come to compose and verify in a unitary research what they have hitherto conducted on separate problems.