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Front to Rear: Architecture and Planning during World War II, March 7-8, 2009 >
Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item:
http://hdl.handle.net/2451/30264
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| Title: | Italy 1942: Visions of the Future Dwelling |
| Authors: | Casciato, Maristella |
| Keywords: | architecture
Italy
World War II |
| Issue Date: | 15-Sep-2011 |
| Abstract: | This paper wishes to examine why and how of what was termed in 1942 'uno
strano momento d'ozio' ('an odd period of idleness') became for an elite
of Italian architects, who grew up under the banner of modernism, a
fertile condition to reassess the future dwelling as the new ideal for
all human beings. One year earlier Alberto Lattuada, architect,
photographer, and renowned film director captured that suspended
atmosphere in his L'occhio quadrato, 26 black and white pictures of
strong realism. The call for reviewing 'la casa e l'ideale' ('the home:
an ideal vision') launched by Domus in August 1942, offered these
architects the model ground to express their dreams and hopes. Domus
program eventually allowed them to free the creation of a kind of
'esperanto' that helped to transfer the iconic rationalism in the
cultivated modern vernacular of postwar reconstruction. It was all but
an escape from reality; rather it showed how these architects used that
call for adjusting their know-how to the elaboration of some radical,
alternative design inventions, that displayed a rich repertoire of
materials and technologies, a visionary high-tech avant la lettre. The
year 1942 may well serve as synecdoche of the period between autharchy
and post-WWII reconstruction. The comparison between Domus and the
special issue of Edilizia Moderna, April-December 1942, entitled
'Costruzioni del Tempo di Guerra' ("Building during War Time")
exemplifies the ambiguities that the profession was confronting. Here
the agony of the regime is in the background, while the buildings show
how technical skill may be turned into dull functionality. I'm planning
as well to read this condition looking backward to a series of booklets,
issued by the Ministry of War in 1938, to instruct architects and
planners, among others, on how to build in order to prevent damages
caused by air attacks. War also meant imprisonment. Ludovico Quaroni,
one of the key figures of twentieth-century Italian architecture and a
protagonist of postwar reconstruction remained in a camp in India for
about five years. His carnets of sketches contained a plenitude of
drawings for the ideal home next to vivid images of village dwellings
and domestic vernacular. Would the Indian trope become a source of his
village like the Tiburtino neighborhood of early '50s? It is worth
exploring further this more distant resonance. No doubt that the
pendulum between desire of the new and nostalgia justified the
permanence of the contradictions this paper aims to illustrate. By the
end, Fascism caused death, fear, emigration...as well as being pivotal
in forcing architects to envision the 'rinascita'. |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/2451/30264 |
| Appears in Collections: | Front to Rear: Architecture and Planning during World War II, March 7-8, 2009
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