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Reconstructing Italy traces the postwar transformation of the Italian nation through an analysis of the Ina-Casa plan for working class housing, established in 1949 to address the employment and housing crises. Government sponsored housing programs undertaken after WWII have often been criticized as experiments that created more social problems than they solved. The neighborhoods of Ina-Casa stand out in contrast to their contemporaries both in terms of design and outcome. Unlike modernist high-rise housing projects of the period, Ina-Casa neighborhoods are picturesque and human-scaled and incorporate local construction materials and methods resulting in a rich aesthetic diversity. And unlik...
***Winner of the American Association for Italian Studies Book Prize 2022*** After World War II, a wave of Italian films emerged that depicted the life and hardships of characters left helpless after the conflict, bringing to the screen the struggles of a time of existential angst and uncertainty. This form of filmmaking was associated with a broader artistic phenomenon known as ‘neorealism’ and is now considered a pivotal point in the history of Italian cinema. But neorealism was not limited to film any more than it was to literature. It spread to other areas of artistic production, including architecture. What was, then, neorealist architecture? This book explores the links between arc...
In the light of the current housing and environmental crisis and increasing social inequalities, there is a growing sense of urgency for architecture as a discipline to engage with the transformation in housing evident in the postwar period. Rather than conceiving this task as a technical matter, this book proposes to reassess the conditions and legacy of this large and ubiquitous housing stock. By foregrounding the mismatch between constructed cultural, social and ideological narratives and the everyday realities of residents, the contributors rediscover some of the tropes of modern housing, such as the impact of technological innovations or the often overlooked character of open spaces, an...
Following Italy's unification in 1861, architects, artists, politicians, and literati engaged in volatile debates over the pursuit of national and regional identity. Growing industrialization and urbanization across the country contrasted with the rediscovery of traditionally built forms and objects created by the agrarian peasantry. Pride in Modesty argues that these ordinary, often anonymous, everyday things inspired and transformed Italian art and architecture from the 1920s through the 1970s. Through in-depth examinations of texts, drawings, and buildings, Michelangelo Sabatino finds that the folk traditions of the pre-industrial countryside have provided formal, practical, and poetic inspiration directly affecting both design and construction practices over a period of sixty years and a number of different political regimes. This surprising continuity allows Sabatino to reject the division of Italian history into sharply delimited periods such as Fascist Interwar and Democratic Postwar and to instead emphasize the long, continuous process that transformed pastoral and urban ideals into a new, modernist Italy.
Die 1970er-Jahre gelten in der deutschen Zeitgeschichte als Epoche eines tief greifenden sozialen Wandels, eines "Strukturbruchs " im Übergang von der Industriemoderne zur postfordistischen Gesellschaft. Die Beiträge dieses Bandes widmen sich diesem Jahrzehnt erstmals aus einer stadthistorischen Perspektive und stellen dabei Entwicklungen in Westdeutschland und Italien einander gegenüber. In Fallstudien zu Städten vom Ruhrgebiet bis Sizilien wird untersucht, wie sich die Umbrüche dieser Zeit im Brennpunkt von städtischem Raum und städtischer Gesellschaft verdichten, als "urbane Krise" wahrgenommen und verhandelt werden und sich in Konflikten in der städtischen Politik sowie Kämpfen in und um die Stadt manifestieren.
Town twinning refers to the postwar phenomenon of administrative exchange between analogous municipalities. Cold War-related research has mostly interpreted it as an instrument to pursue European integration, or to solidify détente "from below". However, municipalities were not only administrative, neutral actors, but also bearers of political content. This is particularly visible in the case of Italian towns located in the Western bloc, guided by socialist-oriented administrations, and their "twin" counterparts in the German Democratic Republic. This volume explores the connections initiated by such towns in the 1960s-1970s, focusing on socialist-specific conceptions which fueled the polic...
Ludovico Quaroni, a native Roman, was a master of Italian architecture during the second half of the twentieth century; his talent contributed to the education – in addition to the majority of the younger generations of architects in Italy – of Carlo Aymonino, Manfredo Tafuri and Antonino Terranova. He also constituted one of the fundamental references to the elaboration of Aldo Rossi’s theories on the city. An architect and urban planner, professor and author, Quaroni represents the most open and inclusive methodological and linguistic experimentalism and the most progressive identity of modern Italian architecture, founded on the close relationship between historic culture, social an...
Foreword by Adrian Forty. The Algarve is not only Portugal’s foremost tourism region. Uniquely Mediterranean in an Atlantic country, its building customs have long been markers of historical and cultural specificity, attracting both picturesque driven conservatives and modernists seeking their lineage. Modernism, regionalism and the ‘vernacular’ – three essential tropes of twentieth-century architecture culture – converged in the region’s building identity construct and, often the subject of strictly metropolitan elaborations, they are examined here from a peripheral standpoint instead. Drawing on work that won the Royal Institute of British Architects President’s Award for Out...
Bringing to light the debt twentieth-century modernist architects owe to the vernacular building traditions of the Mediterranean region, this book considers architectural practice and discourse from the 1920s to the 1980s. The essays here situate Mediterranean modernism in relation to concepts such as regionalism, nationalism, internationalism, critical regionalism, and postmodernism - an alternative history of the modern architecture and urbanism of a critical period in the twentieth century.
In the post-war period, Berlin and Naples experienced a phase of profound changes, essentially influenced by external factors: the less rigid urban structure which had been ruined by World War II, resulting in severe changes in the social and economic structure, an uncritical reception and implementation of largely theoretical models of functionalism in urban planning, and in the design of the new public building interventions. On the one hand, between the 1940s and the 1980s, Berlin experienced a considerable loss in population, a political isolation and an urban splitting, as the urban planning institutions, deeply influenced by relevant politics, slowly and thoroughly changed the cityscap...