Morandi Pier Luigi Nervi was with the leading figure among the Italian engineers. He contributed to the technical development of reinforced concrete construction, but it has created structures that solve the above calculation powerful static spatial compositions. While after the war, the design trend of Nervi focused towards finding a balance reassuring, often symmetric and static, Morandi reach the most relevant results focusing on technical and aesthetic side. As noted by Bruno Zevi, Morandi structures seem frozen for a moment before the crash. Shelves and overhangs, supported beams, arches with three hinges, stays and frames (all that complex of static figures that form the famous "spider" - a mixed blessing for students of engineering and architecture) are juxtaposed in a manner not at all classic and reassuring: in the light of traditional building methods, the structures are indeed feasible and its for this is efficient, logical and economic reasons for the concrete.
Morandi was the god for a lifetime of successful union: that between the concrete from one side and the other iron. The one that responds to compressive stress with the geometry and mass of the sections, the other to the traction with the elasticity of the material together and we talk about this happily married, expanding in a similar way to thermal stress . The result material is a supportive, strong, unbreakable, malleable forms and infinitives static patterns that, by using the technique of prestressing, to achieve very high light and the realization of the great works of modern technology. Morandi
The engineer, born in 1902, experienced the potential of reinforced concrete and prestressed structures in a different destination, from housing to entertainment halls, from garages to aircraft hangars, on bridges to bridges.
Before the war, working in an intense relationship patron-designer for the new city Industrial Colleferro working across the board from planning to construction of facilities and services. In the Thirties, engages in the design of auditoria, the Augustus, built within an existing building a new structure that penetrates 18 meters wide that bears the three floors above the cinema, and Julius Caesar, around 2000 places where the data is the characteristic curved balcony that houses the gallery.
Work on entertainment halls has its most important episode in the creation of the Majestic Cinema in Rome more than half of the fifties. It is a multipurpose building of 50,000 cubic meters that represents the state of the art of the moment. It 's a cinema of 2600 people, six more homes, underground halls for entertainment and two arms with a plan for bar and snacks. The set works as a condenser and commercial advertising in a growing suburb with all the rules in a ferocious speculation. Morandi work with sincerity on the diversity of functions. Create a package of housing more strictly serial and reveals the civil service by bringing in front the scale of cinema seen through the glass panels. The interior of the film is a structural part of piers that are traveling at variable weights of the horizontal cantilevered balconies up to their point of discharge. But the whole building is mainly characterized by six portals lame start atrium, and through 40 meters of the room, going to rest on a beam that contains the space stage. The entire building, including the three floors of apartments above, is supported by this huge frame. Technically the work using the principle of prestressing which Morandi has actively worked since the war years also carrying seven patented systems for the tension of the cable.
In large buildings for aircraft, Morandi execution of the roof hung on the media to not have obstacles in the peripheral areas of work. In the first hangar, a shelf cantilevered 60 meters supported by stays the same is repeated in parallel series, while that achieved in about ten years later, the roof is designed as a tent supported by tie rods with radial growth from the three vertical supports. In both cases, the concrete used is pursuing the idea of \u200b\u200blightness and the image of the gratings stays against the sky.
In Turin underground structure of 69 meters wide and eight long, 151 high, the stress is on the contrary in the plastic and the rhythm of powerful beams with variable section they collect in the inclined supports and hinged to the ground, already tested in many bridges. The building is at the same time stiffened and dynamically scanned through the combination of standing, that breaks a monotonous repetition of the serial, and the intersection of the beams which, joining at an angle upright staggered, creating in the middle of the diamond glass block from which the light penetrates. If in the casings of its buildings the engineer reveals some elementary stiffness and, in this underground hall and its many bridges is completely free to combine in a single step calculation, static scheme and architectural space. This makes useless any distinction between technology and art (or between engineering and architecture) and gives form to that fleeting moment that Morandi is balance.
An internationally known chapter of his work is marked by the bridges and viaducts, accomplishments in which coagulates the technical effort to crossing large distances in three-dimensional tension the members. Here too, the engineer experience: from structures to those arched beam systems with stays and frames. In the first case it suffices to note the overpass on the Corso Francia in Rome and the Ponte Vespucci in Florence where the technical aspect of prestressing is resolved in the elegant simplicity of the profiles and aesthetic tension to the horizontal of the second, the bridge over the Storms River in South Africa in which the performance (based on the rotation of two arches built vertically and then lowered to lean in key) is as important as the design itself. But the most important and interesting works are based on a scheme turned away from any structure or trilithic the past. It consists of two structural tasks overturned that determine the vertical supports.
The first, smaller, is hinged on the support base and a shelf holds the first part of the truss, while the second - bigger - it soars into space to anchor the stays which hangs the second leg of the truss. The sculptural forms and the magic balance of forces interacting coagulated in this static scheme is the trademark and logo of Morandi and allows to complete assignments throughout the prestigious Italian art of building the bridge of nine km of the lagoon of Maracaibo in Venezuela in the early sixties, the viaduct on Polcevera in Genoa in 1964, the Bridge over the Wadi El Kuff completed in Libya in 1971. Human interventions are raging on the major dimensions of nature or the city where much of it and discussing the catalog. But with the same balance of forces gives rise to small events as well calibrated and beautiful as the Viaduct sull'ansa of the Tiber in 1965.
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In Italian schools of architecture there are many tests dedicated to building science. The new graduate acquires a solid foundation to make a proper sizing of the structures according to a set of verification "in morphology and static patterns already given. All the experience and the work of Sergio Musmeci tried instead to make an argument "to form".
not the proper sizing and box created to abstract morphologies quite different reasons, but an argument you are looking for the best way to convey the forces. A logical form that is intimately and at the same time necessarily innovative. He said to his students in the Bridges and Structures at the Faculty of Architecture in Rome and the structural chemistry, born in the nineteenth century as a positivist science, was placed into the structures, such as in front of nature, as if both had something 'given' that one can only investigate. The structure and architecture in general, by contrast, are Musmeci created by the designer. "Just as a theory of modern physics that is created by the physicist." Creativity is therefore the basis of contemporary science and engineering is an integral part.
Who knew Sergio Musmeci retains a vivid memory, often used to convey the importance of this meeting the word "genius".
Manfredi Nicoletti, an architect active since the sixties with great works and the author of essays on architecture, ancient and modern, Musmeci writes a book that is valuable to the interweaving of at least three reading levels. The first is informational. For the first time in volume, after the distant No. And No. 80 of Parameter 387 de L'architecture, provides an explorer and a bibliography for the study of major works of Musmeci, some really important and unique as its proposal for the Bridge over the Strait of Messina in 1970, the bridge over Basento of 1969 or the Via Appia Antica, 1979 brought to fruition by his wife Zenaide Zanini after the untimely death of the designer in 1981.
Watching these and other works is exciting. It turns out, among other things, like some contemporary design techniques, such as the folding is so central in the search for Peter Eisenman, had found his advances and structural reasons in the search for Musmeci.
the factory made Pietrasanta in 1956, the Chapel of the railroad and the Gymnasium of the cones in Vicenza, Teatro Regio, by Carlo Mollino in Turin can be seen in action pleated structures. On one side is right static (innovative logic to stiffen the structure and then to save material and reduce the sections) is the other tool to devise structures-landscape. On the other hand by Maillart at Morandi in Musmeci Calatrava, this horizon is essential. In the structures we measure to deal with nature and to be the new part.
The second key of the book is writing relevant, accurate, never pedantic with which Nicoletti expresses the center of the structural reasons for Musmeci. Why the skyscraper they worked together in 1971 to develop helical allowing the wind to flow away, because the very structure of the bridge moves in Messina on the idea of \u200b\u200ba single span of network that surrounds the deck stay cables holding it to the compressed thus contributing to masts and rigidity, because through the curves of spiral ribs Sport Stadium in Rome you minimize the pressure of time and so on. Nicoletti suggests as an argument actually becomes creative force structure of architecture. It follows that "The form is unknown, no tension "and other sections of the test involving" external forces "," The shape and the minimum structural "," The limiting form, the action of static and matter "" The expressiveness of the structures, "" continuous systems, discrete and mixed. "To expand on some of these concepts, I believe that profit is the simultaneous reading of a book that has had much luck in the United States. This is Mario Salvadori, Why Buildings stand, finally translated in Tools Bompiani.
The third level is represented by the volume of Nicoletti engraved, by paragraphs, the notations that the author devotes to the personality of his friend.
Modesty and understatement is the stretch of Musmeci, curiosity is the engine of his explorations in seemingly remote fields (music, astronomy, navigation) by its professionalism, the ability of creative synthesis is its particularity, its magic.
Nicoletti writes. "It was hard for me to accept the invitation sent by Bruno Zevi writing a book on Sergio Musmeci, because I have not yet resigned to his death. Musmeci (...) was struck by lightning just as bad as the his personality as an architect and scientist reached maturity and began to produce works significant to prove the originality and practicality of his unconventional theories.
His originality also descended from his wealth of knowledge and interests, all grown in depth. The degree in Civil Engineering had joined in the early fifties, that the Air Force. Then dominated the aerodynamics and related disciplines with high technology of lightweight construction. But his secret strength was in what he calls 'study at the Rousseau', a wandering among books and arguments often random drawing from 'personal juice with no time limit and discipline'. "
Musmeci used the word cybernetics, that is, for the Zingarelli, "the theory of control systems that are used in particular analogies between machines and the nervous system of animals and man." At a time which attention to the relationship between science, architecture, structure, nature has new strength by information technology, Sergio Musmeci not appear at all as a precursor, but an almost indispensable traveling companion.
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