"Twenty years ago, some of the experiences of radical Italian goliardic were greeted almost as a joke: when, for the first time, albeit at a level experimental, proposed replacing, finally, the architecture of the model with the architecture of the city . But those experiences, a dozen years earlier, had, too, had a significantly earlier (and equally ignored, or pilloried): In a series of projects (degree of competition) belonging to the same line of research initiated by Professor Giuseppe Samona, together with young researchers from the University Institute of Architecture of Venice. "
Francesco Tentori, chief editor of" Casabella "Rogers, author of fundamental studies on Le Corbusier and Pietro Maria Bardi, Architect and planner in Italy and South America, a professor of urban design in Venice, recounts the experiences discussing the project with the protagonists.
Tentori want to think again about the pioneering stage because he believes that the models developed are valid, but mainly because he believes necessary "Access with the modern "architects propose that the attention of the problems, contradictions, the challenges of a world that comes close to ten billion people and that those projects was already on the horizon.
Learning from Venice condensing these ideas through an examination of some projects now little known or forgotten. The first is drawn from the group Samonà for the national competition of the business center of Turin. We are in Italy in 1963 and is now being burst. The exhausting experience of post-conflict reconstruction-who had a scope in many buildings are of In-House-behind. The idea of \u200b\u200bcommunity and neighborhood, the requirements of the Manual of In House architect or brochures, the attempt to design projects to remember the achievements of Nordic organic matrix or our rural clusters, the development of a design which takes into account the social sciences in Italy during the boom came to represent a provincial heritage from "Land of the Baroque." Ludovico Quaroni, to whom we owe this definition, had lived at that stage and made public self-criticism, not only in words but also in a famous project for the salt marshes of San Giuliano in Mestre, which proposed the exact opposite of what is planned before. Ideology of the country, replaces a territorial dimension of architecture because the great semicircles on the waterfront structures intended to be able to communicate with the entire lagoon.
Giuseppe Samona had written in the late fifties a text that became the fundamental reference point for new ideas: Town planning and the future of the city crisis arose in the prescriptive zoning and planning techniques to insist that the architecture was to do the same town. At the Athens Charter, which outlines a functionalist and quantitative view, we preferred to other experiences of Le Corbusier: How to Plan Obus, where a highway that contained the lower floors and housing services, wound for miles along the Bay of Algiers. The architecture had become city and gave the relationship with nature, landscape, already built.
The theme of the great tertiary structures and management of the Italian cities (Turin, but also Florence, Rome, Naples, Bologna) seemed a fitting program to new ideas and their draft Competition Samonà group he appointed a clear application. "One great body building fluent and flexible", wrote Bruno Zevi, "in which the characterization process that follows function, as you point out and complete."
Another pioneering project was that for the accommodation of the new bag of Tronchetto in Venice. The group Samonà proposed that all the functions of the terminal rail and sea were collected in two artificial islands which create a strong image and a new subway. But the same tension in the conception of architecture as "urban fact" occurred even when the scale was limited to a single building as the offices of Anas office in Palermo or in the beautiful proposal for the new offices of the Chamber of Deputies in the historical center of Rome in 1965.
This group of ideas (the identity of architecture and urban design, the large size, the excess of the zoning , the disciplinary autonomy of architecture from the social sciences) early in projects and books Samona is transferred in the work of employees and teachers of young Venetians. Tentori proposes a design competition for the attention of the group of Roman and Chivirico Dardi to the hospital in Venice. Not only is a further development of that reasoning, but the singular fact, and so far almost unknown, is that this project was the basis for the next project for the Hospital of Venice written by the great Le Corbusier.
The ideas generated by Giuseppe Samona have begun to permeate the entire Italian architecture when, in the second half of the sixties, Aldo Rossi and Carlo Aymonino have developed a reading of "architecture" of urban transformation and at the same time have made an important made manifest: the homes popular in Gallarate, Milan. Many works have followed such as Valeriano Pastor and staff for the hospital Larino near Campobasso, Aymonino of the school campus in Pesaro, a large residential Rozzol Melara court of Charles Celli, the district Zen in Palermo and the University of Calabria Gregotti until Corviale Mario Fiorentino, the building of a kilometer down an embankment between city and country on the western outskirts of Rome.
"Learning from Venice," for architects who were trained in the seventies in the faculties of Italian architecture, it became a must: he meant to refer to a theoretical construct that departed from the University, groped to answer through architecture to those that appeared the great needs of society, to propose new models of living, to build, to design the relationship between architecture and cities. That the models proposed in the season if they are - in our view rightly - being gradually replaced other part of the evolution of thought and ideas, but Tentori is right in stressing that today is the intellectual challenge and professional at that time was the as characterizing the surface to be buried by an empty "architecture of the model."
One of the creed of functionalism was to cultivate the illusion that through a process focused on resolving individual problems (housing, distribution system, the distance between the buildings in relation to height, uniform exposure to the sun etc.) could succeed in building the city. But already in the fifties and sixties we hope that a process "from the spoon to the city" could not bear comparison with the results in urban environments before. It is precisely in the overturning of this sum and analytical concept that Italian culture has made a fundamental contribution and much thanks to the lessons of Samona and the School of Venice. In fact
Learning from Venice also launched a hope. The ideas, concepts, projects can transform reality, even if they themselves are nebulous, uncertain, contradictory. That's why, sometimes, need to go back to a record, as this difficult but exciting.
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