Figures of Neorealism in Italian Architecture (Part 1)

Home , Adriatico (train), Carlo Aymonino, Corrado Alvaro, Gottardo (train), Marcello Piacentini, Mario Alicata

Tiburtino District, Rome, 1949–1954. Plan. As published in Casabella continuità 215 (April–May 1957).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127822 by guest on 30 September 2021 Figures of Neorealism in Italian Architecture (Part 1)

BRUNO REICHLIN TRANSLATED BY ANTONY SHUGAAR. REVISED BY BRANDEN W. JOSEPH

In film or in literature, “Neorealism” is not a label selected by a group or movement to describe a more-or-less clearly defined formal and ideological program propagated through manifestos and journals. Instead, the term was coined by critics and used to designate a set—at first glance a fairly disparate set—of intentions and works that appeared bound together by shared traits that could be traced, at least in theory, to movements and works that had previously been designated by the term “realism.” In architecture, however, the idea of Neorealism cannot be described as the successor to any movement of “Realism” that could be construed as a historic antecedent. Only the occasional left-wing critic has claimed to iden- tify a realist impulse in the most radical forms of “functionalism,” although it has subsequently become clear that the so-called “Neorealist” Italian architects almost entirely ignored the work of Georg Schmidt, Karel Teige, and others, even if the political propensities of many of the Italians might have led us to suppose that they had an understanding or felt a certain indulgence toward “socialist realism” in architecture.1 Italian architectural criticism derived the term Neorealism from literature and film once the works and authors laying claim to the term already enjoyed a certain popularity among critics and the public, and those who were designated Neorealist architects accepted the description with varying degrees of conviction and enthusiasm. In the following I will attempt to provide—and I will try to do no more than this—an inventory and analysis of the “rhetorical figures” (appropriate to an architectural discourse) that produced effects of form and meaning sufficient to legitimize the extension of the term Neorealism from the domain of literature and film to that of architecture. In order to avoid weighing the demonstration down beyond reasonable measure, I will allow myself, when writing about literature and film, certain ellipses that may seem disorienting, as well as an exceedingly opportunistic array of references. In Italian literary criticism, the term Neorealism was, it seems, first used by

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127822 by guest on 30 September 2021 Arnaldo Bocelli in 1931 in reference to Alberto Moravia’s novel The Time of Indifference of 1929 and Corrado Alvaro’s Revolt in Aspromonte of the following year.2 In this essay, Bocelli contrasted the formalism of the authors close to the journal Ronda to the “contentism” of authors such as Moravia, Alvaro, Jovine, Vernari, Brancati, and others. While in Moravia’s The Time of Indifference the term Neorealism was applied to a pitiless portrait of a decaying, ideal-less bour- geoisie, which the author captured right down to the banality of its conversations and idiosyncrasies, in Alvaro it designated a description of the social and moral condition of the world of rural Calabria, described in detail, without any conces- sions to folklore or the myths of country life. Here, clearly, the term derives from an imported notion of realism that first appeared in the nineteenth century with the French author, essayist, and critic Champfleury and progressively served to designate the novels of Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, and the Goncourt brothers, as well as the paintings of Gustave Courbet and so on.3 As though to minimize the debt to their French cousins, Italian writers used the term “verismo” (as opposed to “realismo”) to designate author Giovanni Verga’s vast fresco of the “defeated” members of nineteenth-century Sicilian society. The novelist described in detail the customs and lifestyles of the various social groups, paying particular attention to the syntax, vocabulary, and modes of argumenta- tion typical of each class and profession. In the same way, Federico De Roberto’s historical novel The Viceroys would also be called “verist.”4 In Marxist inspired literary and artistic criticism, realism had been accorded a central role since Karl Marx expressed his great admiration for Balzac and—as Friedrich Engels related in a letter to his friend, the author Margaret Harkness—described him as a “master of realism . . . far greater . . . than all the Zolas, past, present, or future.”5 But let us return to Neorealism. A surgical examination of matters of society, an almost documentary attention to the everyday, an adherence in thought and language to the social origins and personalities of the characters, a more-or-less direct criticism of current society and morals: these are the identifying characteristics of a literary production that put the sycophants of the culture of the fascist regime on their guard and laid the foundations for the novels and accounts of the Italian Resistance and Reconstruction. Italo Calvino recalled that, for the younger generations emerging from the war, Neorealism was not a school but a climate, the experience of a collective state of mind shared everywhere in the trains, that were starting to run again, crammed with people and bags of flour and drums of oil, [where] every passenger would recount to complete strangers

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127822 by guest on 30 September 2021 the adventures which had befallen him. . . . The result was that those who began writing in that period found themselves dealing with the same subject matter as these anonymous storytellers: not only did we have the adventures that each one of us had endured person- ally or witnessed, but there were also tales which came to us already formed as narratives, with a voice, a cadence, a facial gesture to accompany them.

However—and Calvino’s emphasis is quite important—“Characters, landscapes, shoot-outs, political messages, dialect words, swear-words, lyric passages, vio- lence and sexual encounters, all these were but colours on our palette, notes on our scale.” Because, he continues, “there were never such obsessive formalists as ourselves; we claimed to be a school of objective writers, but there were never such effusive lyricists as us.”6 These observations about the formalism of those who claimed to be writing in the service of content go straight to the heart of Neorealist poetics. They apply even more strongly to the architecture which, as opposed to other arts, finds itself, so to speak, hampered by the fact that its raison d’être is undeniably utili- tarian. But let us pause for a moment longer on this Neorealist “climate.” In a recent conference, Gianni Rondolini stated that: The image of Neorealism . . . is the Italy of the Liberation, of the immediate post-War period. Destroyed cities, poverty, and a disintegrating social fab- ric. In this raw material grew the great experiment that in time informed every means of expression: radio, newspaper supplements, films, and books. In the face of a mutilated society there was a desire for a sincere art, capable of giving a voice to the defeated: an art to serve reality, to revive itself in a “Neorealism of the image.”7 At the same conference Alberto Farassino went even further; Neorealist cinema, he claimed, “was not an elitist trend confined to the world of ideology, but a matter of everyday life that passed from film to reality, and vice-versa. Something that was propagated by the popular press and not by intellectuals.”8 It fell to the cre- ators of a Neorealist cinema to “retouch” the stories where they were a bit too seductive and to undercut certain legends. “The term ‘Neorealism’ was born with Ossessione (1943),” recalled Luchino Visconti in an interview in 1965. “It happened when I sent the first rushes of my film from Ferrara to my film editor Mario Sarandrei in Rome.” A few days later Sarandrei wrote back to say: “I don’t know how to define this type of cinema other than the term ‘neorealist.’” After causing a scandal at its opening on May 16, 1943, the film received Mussolini’s approval.9

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127822 by guest on 30 September 2021 As in literature, the themes and language of Neorealist cinema had been in gesta- tion even before the joint action of the Allies and the Italian Resistance brought the collapse of Fascism. Attesting to this are the screenplays by Luigi Comencini and Cesare Zavattini that put an end to “imaginary story lines” and “films with white telephones”; or the article by Mario Alicata and Giuseppe De Santis written in the midst of the war, in 1941, which established from the very title a connection between Verga’s “verismo” and a courageous program for the rejuvenation of Italian cinema. In “Truth and Poetry: Verga and Italian Cinema,” Alicata and De Santis proclaimed a “Faith in truth and in the poetry of truth, faith in man and in the poetry of man.”10 In a later essay they supplied more concrete details on the tasks they had given themselves: We also . . . want to take our cameras into the streets, the fields, the harbors, and the factories of our country. We too are persuaded that one day we shall create our finest film by following the slow and tired steps of a factory worker returning home at the end of the day, narrating the essential poetry of a new and pure life that contains within itself the secret of its aristocratic beauty. Perhaps that is why . . . today we have discarded the vulgar dime novels from our writing desks.11 When, with the Quartiere Tiburtino, we can finally speak of a “Neorealist architecture” in the full sense of the term, literary and cinematic Neorealism had already come to represent an ensemble of intentions and experiences that pervaded the whole of Italian culture. The cinema already enjoyed an international success, with its actors, directors, and screen writers—from Rossellini, De Sica, and Zavattini to Ingrid Bergman and Anna Magnani—on the front pages of the newsmagazines. Journals committed to the “democratization of literature,” such as Politecnico, opened their pages to readers who approved or censured the published stories.12 Neorealism, above all in film, was now identifiable by its content and its stylistic tropes, conceits, and idiosyncrasies to such an extent that “Steno” (director, screen- writer, and critic Stefano Vanzina), could publish, in August, 1948, in the pages of the film weekly Star, a ferocious two-paragraph satire that left no doubt about its intent: His “Ten Commandments of the Perfect Neorealist Director” and “Inevitable Characters in a Neorealist Film” took the form of a parody of fascist orders.13 Since they pertain to the subject of this article and convey the character of these films rather well, I will quote certain of these commandments almost in their entirety: Magnani’s swearwords on the sound track are not discussed [a paraphrase of the well-known fascist saying: “Orders are obeyed, not discussed”].

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127822 by guest on 30 September 2021 Neorealist films are made everywhere, always, with every means, even in the toilets of a train, even when those toilets are in use. Neorealism defends itself even by talking about love on a gasoline can. Dirty the protagonist’s face with dust, mud, coal, even your own blood if necessary. Set the story in the outskirts of town and victory will already be ﬁrmly within your grasp. Let your motto be: “Believe in the trolley and train conductors, obey the yellow press, combat Peach Melbas [paraphrase of the fascist: “Believe, Obey, Combat”]. Remember that shoeshine boys and streetwalkers must lead the way. If Rossellini leads, copy him; if he retreats, praise him; if he is successful, take revenge. The white telephone is your enemy: give it no quarter. Women’s legs uncovered to the middle of the thigh are always right [instead of “Il Duce is always right”].

Equally interesting is the “Inevitable Characters in a Neorealist Film”: The overweight father searching the whorehouses of the town for his daughter, who vanished during an air raid. . . . A priest bicycling toward the town of Comacchio. The village idiot (with a limp, crippled, lame, mute and a stutterer at the same time) who has fallen in love with the provocative wife of the postman. . . . The stepfather who, whenever he catches sight of his step- daughter, is seized by repressed lust in spite of himself, the veins on his forehead throbbing, becoming turgid, solid, intertwined like the waste pipes in the apartment block courtyards [emphasis added]. Sicilian fishermen, farmers in a cooperative farm, refugees, truck drivers, and country folk, as needed. An accordion. In this pitiless listing Steno indicates not only the characters and settings but also the canonical “figures” of the Neorealist message: the preference accorded to the culture, values, and lives of the working classes who are supposed to be the rightful holders of “real life”; apartment block courtyards, toilets, swearwords of Anna Magnani vs. white telephones, Peach Melbas, and “elevated” themes; the banality of the “slice of life” against a novelistic life; the preference accorded to antiheroes, such as fishermen, farmers, and truck drivers; the propensity for an aesthetic of the ugly: the cripple-mute-stutterer, the overweight father . . . We shall soon see the lines that connect the form and content of this cinema to certain architectural constructions in Italy immediately after the war. But first, and because it is an official document representing the dominant thought of the period, I would like to say a few words about what might be called the “Ten Commandments of the Perfect Neorealist Architect.” This time the humor is

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127822 by guest on 30 September 2021 inadvertent, for I am referring to the bureaucratic “Suggestions, norms, and out- lines for the development and presentation of designs . . .” found in the part of the “Fanfani Law” addressing the “Plan for increased employment and the construction of workers’ houses.”14 The house should contribute to the formation of the urban environment, keeping in mind the spiritual and material needs of man, of a real man and not of an abstract being: of a man, that is, who does not love and does not understand the indeﬁnite and monotonous repetitions of the same type of residence, among the many of which he cannot distinguish his own, save by its street number; he does not love checkerboard arrangements, but rather environments that are intimate and lively at the same time. It will be therefore the conditions of the land, the exposure to the sun, the landscape, the vegetation, the existing environment, and the sense of color that will sug- gest the composition of the layout so that the inhabitants of the new urban centers will have the impression of something spontaneous, genuine, and indissolubly tied to the place where they stand. The text further “suggests”: In any case, the greatest care should be taken so that, in residential constructions, the overall visual impression will prevail over the single element, intentionally trying to create an environment when a place is deprived of one by nature. For this, it is advisable to alternate the play of walls between high and low, continual and broken, short and long, ﬂat and studded with jut- ting surfaces and spaces (windows and loggias), and to arrange them both frontally and at an angle, varying the perspectives that one has from the entries or main windows of the apartment. (Recall, regarding the feared anonymity of “rationalist” modern architecture, the popular cartoon showing a confused factory worker contemplating a row of iden- tical houses, saying that he knows he owns one of them but he is not sure which.)

The Tiburtino District (Rome, 1949–1954) Today the Tiburtino district seems like so direct an emanation of these “suggestions” that one wonders if there might not have been one of the designers of the neighborhood behind the drafting of the law. But the Tiburtino did more, as Carlo Aymonino tells us in a sort of gently self-mocking confession, a “History and Chronicle of the Tiburtino District,” that is “Neorealist” even in its very title. (The Neorealists professed a particular love for the genre of the chronicle: from the

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127822 by guest on 30 September 2021 Chronace di un amore [Chronicle of a Love, Story of a Love Affair (1950)] by Antonioni to the Cronache di poveri amanti [Chronicles of Poor Lovers, A Tale of Poor Lovers] by the novelist Vasco Pratolini, later made into a film by Carlo Lizzanti; and, finally, Architettura: Cronache e storia [Architecture: Chronicles and Histories], the name of Bruno Zevi’s journal [founded in 1955 and compet- ing with Casabella continuità] in which Aymonino was a contributor). “From the beginning of the project for the district,” Aymonino recalls, the accepted idea was to move beyond a rationalist type of composition, dictated by uniform orientations, constant distances, and the repetition of a few building types (even though in the earliest plans we can sense that very approach in various points of the neighborhood) in order to obtain a unity by means of the superposition of always different perspectives formed by a succession of diverse spaces brought together by a renewed value of the street.15 Nothing was left to chance, and nothing proved to be more difficult than this desire to obtain variety and, above all, an effect of naturalness and spontaneity in the layout of the district. Mario Ridolfi recalls that, once a few general directives had been established, the numerous architects worked in groups, so that the super- vision of the overall plan demanded an exceedingly laborious compromise among their diverse conceptions in order to harmonize the various lots. Since the plan was required to take into account “the exact position of the existing cavities in the subsoil,” the monitoring of every rise or fold of land powerfully contributed to the varied layout of the roads.16 One can easily imagine the indignation of the young architects Gorio and Rinaldi when, during the very first days of work, “four power- ful earthmovers leveled the entire area, destroying, in the blink of an eye and definitively, months of work . . . devoted to making the long and articulated body of a building (on lot C) follow, meter by meter, the gentle incline of the land.”17 Spontaneity, chance, and a rediscovered value of the street are themes that deliberately abandon the beaten paths of a modernism that adhered narrowly to a strict rationalism and functionalism. But there was more; Aymonino continued: There was an accentuated pursuit of the “picturesque,” with the studied happenstance of many different types of façades and roofs, with the use of balconies for their sculptural functions, with the extension of the first flights of stairs on the exterior of the building in order to reinforce their character of being constructions that had arisen spontaneously at successive moments in time. Stimulated by a renewed interest in traditional materials, as elements

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127822 by guest on 30 September 2021 of a language appropriate to a context of austerity, and the pride of a renun- ciation that showed us to be realists (nowadays, considering the period taken as a whole, we could jokingly say “Neorealists”), we ventured so far as to reach the absurdity of taking inspiration from seventeenth-century Rome, conceiving of the façades as theater decorations—note the balustraded windows on only the top floor, the small, external staircase that starts out, sud- denly, from the third floor to reach a single apartment in the building on the square, the balconies only on two of the three upper floors of a building (the tenant on the fourth floor later had a balcony built at his own expense!), the underpasses and the overpasses, all the way up to the obsessive fragment- ing of the walls and fences. Certainly, we avoided a situation in which any tenant could fail to recognize his own house, but the psychological intention reached the paradox of “inventing” a dialectical discourse at the drawing board, as substitute for an impossible direct invention by the inhabitants of those houses.18

In short, in the Tiburtino—as confirmed by the accounts of the architects or their contemporaries—a bit of a historic city or town was fabricated ex novo, with the intention of producing a double mimesis: 1) New by sheer necessity, the district had to appear to its new inhabitants as the product of historic sedimentation, laden with earlier human, social, economic, and, naturally, architectural vicissitudes, evidence of which was meant to be apparent in the formal dilemmas, the interrupted developments, the stratifica- tions, and, in general, the lively disorder of the entire development. This was exactly the impression had by the architect and urbanist Giovanni Astengo: “The development has the air of a village, with a certain sense of the archaic and casual that contrasts agreeably, as something more intimate, with the chaos of the outskirts of the neighboring metropolis.”19 Although the iconographic references would require an entire chapter of their own, Wolfgang Frankl, a German architect and devoted (and underestimated?) colleague of Mario Ridolfi, hinted at some intriguing paths in an interview with the Swiss architects Marcel Meili and Markus Peter.20 Student of the “Stuttgarterschule,” passionately interested in minor architecture, Frankl scrutinized and drew the towns and villages of central Italy in search of design ideas.21 Thus, Frankl derived one of the most original types of the Tiburtino District—the three-story row house with one apartment on the ground floor opening onto a small courtyard, and the other approached by an aerial walkway—from the fishermen’s houses on the island of Ponza. Likewise, another house type, where the exterior staircase leads directly to the second floor,

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127822 by guest on 30 September 2021 Top and center: Tiburtino District. Photos: Bruno Reichlin. Bottom: Wolfgang Frankl. Housing block in the Tiburtino District. Photo: Bruno Reichlin.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127822 by guest on 30 September 2021 Photographs of vernacular Roman buildings. As published in Paolo Portoghesi, “Dal Neorealismo al Neoliberty,” Comunità 65 (1958).

was to evoke the squares and public buildings of Todi.22 In Italy Builds, the architect and critic G. E. Kidder-Smith, surely inspired by his Italian friends and advisers, also provided an impressive repertory of icons that the “Neorealist” mimetic drew upon.23 2) Such images, in turn, became the vehicle for a second mimesis, this time related to iden- tity. The new inhabitants would come to con- sider themselves—as though by proxy—as being the ones who had built this “place laden with history,” which reminded them of their familiar experience in the suburbs, villages, or neighborhoods they left behind (these were primarily displaced populations constrained to flee their own regions by necessity, force, etc.). Manfredo Tafuri was correct to write that the Tiburtino is the “manifesto of a state of mind, of an impelling need to communicate, to build a reality together with society and not simply for society.” 24 For architecture, this highly developed set of mimetic devices institutes a veritable slight of hand in so far as all its formal work aims paradoxically to erase the architectural composition, to deny the artificiality inherent in the new and, eventually, the intentions of the architects as well, down to the very signs of their work and conception. This paradoxical aesthetic project was also one of the characteristics of Neorealist cinema, which made use of formal devices often analogous—or, perhaps preferably, homologous—to those developed within architecture. In a brilliant analysis of The Bicycle Thief 25—which takes into account Roland Barthes’s classic account of “realism” and André Bazin’s discussion of Neorealist cinema26—Giaime Alonge drew up a remarkable inventory of the mimetic effects employed to give a narrative the substance of a real event, to eliminate the traces of direction and encourage the public’s identiﬁcation with the actors. To mention only a few:

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127822 by guest on 30 September 2021 • The bias against narrative and the rejection of spectacular Hollywood plots. It has often been noted that the story told in The Bicycle Thief would not have merited even a brief mention in the back pages of a newspaper. De Sica astutely indicates his intention at least twice: in a scene showing men using brushes and buckets of glue to affix a Hollywood movie poster of a pneumatic American actress onto a wall, and in a scene where a journalist goes to the police to ask if anything new has happened, and the police sergeant replies, “No, nothing . . . just a bicycle.”27 • The frequent use of medium shots and long shots to frame the actors, who often disappear from the audience’s view as if the lens “were only there to record a story that unfolds by itself,” unconcerned with them, whereas in the films of the thirties and forties close-up and details “explicitly guided the viewer with dramatic effects.”28 • The deliberate interruption of the story, which feigns, in this way, as Alonge noted, “an adherence to phenomenological reality.” The scene in The Bicycle Thief when the worker’s son, Bruno, in the midst of chasing the thief, stops to uri- nate is a good example of this “poetics of dead time.”29 • The frequent decision to have the artificial time of representation coincide with the real time of projection: as in, for example, in Vittorio Da Sica’s film, the visit to the devout woman and the scene where the thief is chased through the bordello.30 • The logical consequence of the banalization of the narrative, of the (apparent) impassivity of the lens, of the adherence to phenomenological reality, which manifests itself, in particular, in the interruptions of the narrative and the decision to allow the time of representation to coincide with the time of projection, is, as Luis Buñuel said, “the elevation of the insignificant act to the rank of a dramatic category.” Recognizing in this the sole merit of Neorealist film, Buñuel illustrated this observation by mentioning a scene in Umberto D. by De Sica and Zavattini where,

a serving woman, for the length of an entire reel, which is to say, for ten full minutes, performs a series of actions that until just a short time before might have seemed unworthy of the screen. We see her enter the kitchen, light the stove, put a kettle on to boil, pour, several times, a pitcher of water over a line of ants that are advancing toward the food in single file, give a thermometer to an old man who feels feverish, and so on. Despite their triviality, we follow these actions with interest and even a certain degree of suspense.31

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127822 by guest on 30 September 2021 Opposite: Scenes from The Bicycle Thief, 1948.

• The use of nonprofessional actors, which is a way, as Alonge suggests, not so much to create a work that is intrinsically more realistic than one using a profes- sional actor, but “to communicate to the spectator the idea that the ﬁlm he or she is viewing is related to reality, because the people that are moving on the screen . . . are . . . men and women entirely similar to those sitting in the theater.”32

Before architecture, then, the cinema deployed treasures of formal invention to reduce the distance between ﬁction and reality, to speak to the audience about its everyday life and problems, which were thereby conferred a cinematic dig- nity. To attain this goal, Neorealist cinema did not hesitate to rub the great “authorial” cinema the wrong way, in the same manner that Neorealist architecture gives the impression of constructing its own language in opposition to the so-called “International Style.” The formal discontinuities of the Tiburtino, to say nothing of its stylistic inconsistencies, as well as its lack of unity and its overabundance of architectural elements (both denotative and connotative, in the number and the weight of the various references) end up producing “a style that systematically cancels its own presence,” just as Bazin claimed had been De Sica’s goal.33 The dead time and the abundance of details that were useless to the narrative in Flaubert’s and Michelet’s writings, signified for Barthes the “category of the ‘real.’”34 Would not the overabundance of variants, details, and forms for the same architectural elements similarly be the signs for the substance and the historical “truth” portrayed in the Tiburtino district? This survey of the Neorealist climate would be incomplete without some reference to the Italian poetry of the time. Walter Siti’s masterful analysis in Neorealism in Italian Poetry, 1941–1956 provides further insight into the “Tiburtino” phenomenon. According to Siti, in poetry “the greatest assurance of truth and concreteness” comes from an opening onto the extra-poetic reality of banal everyday communication, from giving speech to ordinary and marginal people. “In many texts,” he explains, “in effect the voice saying ‘I’ is that of a working-class speaker”: a simplified syntax and vocabulary, technical neologisms, foreign expressions, political slogans, etc. There is no shortage of examples.35 Each of the eighteen components that make up Nicola Ghiglione’s Civil Songs (1945), “is sung by the voice of a character (or a group) distinguished by profession: the song of the cart pushers. . ., of the street sweeper. . ., of the toilet attendant,” as well as “of prostitutes, of drunkards,” and so on. The choral “we” can also make way for the “you” of the poet transformed into a “‘writer’ of the people”: thus Manelli in “The World Changes” [“Il mondo muta,” 1956]: “My song

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127822 by guest on 30 September 2021 Reichlin | Figures of Neorealism in Italian Architecture 91

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127822 by guest on 30 September 2021 Ludovico Quaroni. Place de la Martella, showing the town hall and church, mid-1940s.

will not echo through the drawing rooms:/ I am repelled by cautious words./ Secretary of my own rustic people,/I give my voice to the shepherds.” And Milo De Angelis, self-proclaimed lyrical expert: “But now I want to speak/And say for you as well/That which you do not know how to say.” The telegraph pole/cruciﬁx erupts in “It’s already evening” [“È subito sera”] by Salvatore Quasimodo (1946). The “Song of July 14” [“Canzone del 14 Luglio”] by G. Piovano is above all a political message. “Just as the vocabulary is lowered in the direction of a common vernacular, syntax is asked not to venture too far from the most obvious prose,” writes Siti. “[R]epetitions and parallelisms form part of a nascent ﬁgurality, which is exer- cised on an apparent ‘degree zero’ of syntax.” Imitation of the improper conjunc- tions of working-class speech, easy rhymes and casual assonances, a lowering of the level of the prose, sentence fragments, chance insertions, and the like all point in the same direction. Siti’s critical considerations could all be extended from poetry to the Neorealism of the Tiburtino. Behind the ellipses and the tendency to eliminate syntactical links and mental connections, going so far as to provoke apparently illogical associations of ideas that ignore normal causal and temporal connections, Siti glimpses “a rejection of the entire system of hierarchy and connection.” How can we help but see in the Tiburtino’s triumph of simple parataxis, in the apparent absence of compositional hierarchies and structural order, and so on, an antimodernist revolt against the supposed logical and formal necessity that had been taken on symbolically as an expression of the most radical rationalism? How can one help but suppose that, for architecture as well, profound

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127822 by guest on 30 September 2021 stylistic ruptures are not also the signs of an existential rupture? Turning to the thematic level, Siti notes that “often the stylistic voids coincide with a theme of absence, abandonment, loss, detachment, and flight.” He suggests that, in Rocco Scotellaro, for example, “behind the imitation of spoken language, there is a forced adhesion to the lacerations of the culture to which it is addressed,” and “the tragedy of this distance [is] experienced in depth as a formal tragedy.” For the Tiburtino we could adopt Siti’s basic considerations regarding a “Neorealist syntax” in poetry: one that “obeys this principle: its most profound truth can only translate itself via lack. The ultimate ‘rhetorical figure’ that we should note would be precisely that of inconsistency, stylistic failure.”36 I would like to conclude this summary of the Neorealist character of the Tiburtino with a demonstration, which is to my mind convincing, of the way that in the Italy of the Reconstruction, literary, cinematic, and architectural culture were considered as a whole, traversed with self-referential circuits. The demonstration is couched in two texts by Ludovico Quaroni, who was the head designer—along with Ridolfi—of the Tiburtino. Quaroni’s “The Land of the Baroque” appeared in 1957 in the same issue of Casabella that had been opened to the protagonists and commentators of the Tiburtino, including Aymonino.37 This is a veritable literary “pastiche,” in the Neorealist genre of the “chronicle” or the “slice-of-life,” like the novel The Neighborhood [Il quartiere] by Vasco Pratolini. A master of Neorealist understatement, Quaroni wasted no words on the architecture itself, a “negligible quantity” in the face of “real life.” He begins by speculating on the varied meanings that the concept of tradition takes on in Anglo-Saxon culture and Italian culture. “These were the ideas that came into my mind this evening, Good Friday, in a stroll through the Quartiere Tiburtino, which I had not seen in years.” The tone is set: the fable of the little old man, Quaroni, is set on Good Friday, a Neorealist day if ever there was one in the pious calendar of Christian Democratic Italy. As for the “had not seen in years,” this is nothing more than a literary expedient, for from the end of construction in 1954 to this piece dated 1957, no more than three years, if that, had passed (not counting the tours he conducted for his colleagues, the press, etc.). But let’s return to his description: There were workers returning home with newspapers in hand, there were women making their final purchases for the next day in shops still lit up: in the darkness of the alleys burned the candles of the Via Crucis, arranged here and there throughout the neighborhood with the drapes, blankets, and carpets of the more well-to-do faithful. From another street, behind the

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127822 by guest on 30 September 2021 Left: Giuseppe Pagano and Guarniero Daniel, eds., Architettura rurale italiana, 1936. Catalogue of the Sixth Milan Triennial. Opposite: Architettura rurale italiana, 1936. Illustration of vernacular decorative motifs, p. 63.

cross and the priest, walked a cluster of little girls carrying torches, while nearby the older boys played ball or cleaned their bicycles, ignoring them. There was life, in any case, in the neighborhood. Beautiful or ugly, it lived as best it could. The experiment undertaken here, therefore, seems valid despite the reservations, denunciations, and even hatred that each of us have felt for it.38

We are just a hair’s breadth from caricature, from the priest on his bicycle. Quaroni will do this again with regard to the view that opens onto the Piazza della Martella, facing the church. They’re all there: workers, peasants on foot and on bikes, women with shopping bags, children in the church courtyard, and, in the foreground—standing like a tower with his back turned to us, master of the site, inspecting his flock as he holds his prayerbook behind him—the essential character: the priest. Might Don Camillo have passed through here? The other Quaroni essay I would like to cite is from 1954. It is thus contempo- raneous with the construction of the Tiburtino and certainly not foreign to its “baroque” character. Long unpublished, Quaroni’s “Characters of Rome” affirms that: The baroque spirit is the spirit of Rome. It is a spontaneous generation, a creature of the site: autochthonous. It uses, even in the order of architecture, the vital disorder of the life of Rome. It uses the air, sun, clouds, and light as compositional elements, as construction materials. It exploits the feel- ings experienced by a man as he walks along the road, stimulated by con- trast, movement, and mystery, developing their tension into a dramatic harmony of daring equilibriums, of mobile and forced perspectives, of broken verticals, in a continuity obtained by dint of the modulation of spaces and their articulation according to a nervous range that does not stop at refinements. Refinements that, at bottom, have no interest when faced with the solid argument of the disorderly and organic construction of the entire urban unit. And all of this in that irrational spirit that accepts conformity in order to grant itself the most gratuitous liberties, at least in appearance, a spirit that makes rhetoric its own, to better be able to scorn that which it formerly exalted.39

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127822 by guest on 30 September 2021 This paean to a “minor” Roman Baroque seems particularly interesting, for among the many precedents invoked by critics of architectural Neorealism, there is here an unstated, but no doubt decisive, reference. With regard to the Italian reconstruction, one rightfully invokes: • the inﬂuence of the revised and adjusted, humanized, material, sensual, and naturalistic rationalism of so-called “Scandinavian empiricism.”40 • the propaganda of Bruno Zevi and his “Association for an Organic Architecture,” which disseminated the organicism of Frank Lloyd Wright, the sociological convictions of Lewis Mumford, and, naturally, the Scandinavian example.41 • the progressive rediscovery and rehabilitation of minor architecture by modern architects, beginning, at least, from the late twenties. This was not a disin- terested reevaluation, for it allowed the modern Italians to oppose the arches and columns of academics and “pompiers” with their own noble neighborhoods com- ing out of a popular and indigenous tradition of “functionalism”—in other words, Pompeii and Herculaneum, as well as the rascards of the Aosta valley, the trulli of Apulia, and so on.42

On the other hand, two of Rome’s most successful pre-War experiments in urbanism, destined largely for the working class, are habitually neglected by the critics: the garden-suburb of the Garbatella and the garden city Aniene.43 Both neighborhoods, Garbatella (begun in 1920 according to Gustavo Giovannoni and Marcello Piacentini’s urban plan) and Aniene (according to Giovannoni’s plan alone), rightly hold places in the school “dubbed ‘barocchetto’ for the nostalgic and unassuming tone [that] characterized the work of numerous Roman architects for several years.”44 The same source points out: In linguistic terms, the settlement bespeaks a full-hearted quest for the picturesque, the vernacular, and the rediscovery of those elements of the minor architecture of Rome of the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries that Giovannoni and, with him, the Artistic Association of Connoisseurs of

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127822 by guest on 30 September 2021 Architecture [Associazione artistica fra i cultori di Archittura] were prop- agating in those years, and which constituted a type of progressive response to eclecticism.45

While modern Rome was demolishing neighborhoods and highlighting arche- ological parks, the students of Ridolfi’s generation, stimulated by a few impas- sioned teachers, discovered, elevated, and reinterpreted the minor Roman baroque. In the previously cited interview with Frankl, it is also a question of the passion for the baroque inculcated by the professor Vincenzo Fasolo in his student Ridolﬁ. In it, Frankl also recalls that Giovannoni, during the building com- mission meetings, did his best to resist “Neorationalism” by encouraging a renewed interest in the final period of the baroque.46 In the end, couldn’t the Tiburtino be seen as the encounter of Innocenza Sabbatini’s fanciful “barocchetto” at Garbatella or Aniene and Scandinavian “Neo-Empiricism”?

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127822 by guest on 30 September 2021 Gustavo Giovannoni and Marcello Piacentini (urban planners). The Bourgade de Garbatella, 1920s. Photo: Bruno Reichlin.

Notes address the subject of “realism” in architecture A French translation of “Figures of Neorealism as well. In their exchange of letters during 1950– in Italian Architecture” appeared in Les Cahiers 1951 Teige wrote: “Until now, it was not usual to du Musée National d’art moderne 69 (Fall 1999): talk about realism in architecture. The theoreti- 77–113. Part 2 will appear in Grey Room 06. cians of socialist realism were the ﬁrst to extend this concept to architecture. If one wants to accept 1. I am not aware of any investigation into the this concept and give it a meaning, one is forced critical success of the term “realism” in archi- to admit that realism has the same meaning as tecture. When Manfredo Tafuri was asked to functionalism. The fact of deriving the form from write an essay on “Architecture and Realism,” he an ensemble of material/practical and ideal/psy- began his treatment of the theme by pointing out chic functions that a certain project must satisfy, that “What I shall call here Realism . . . is . . . the in other words, the recognition of the exigencies fruit of a historic construction; not, therefore, a and fundamental principles of functionalism— trend experienced as such by its protagonists, within a dialectical development—are [sic], if but rather an attitude that expressed itself and you will, completely realist” (text reprinted as was produced outside of lines of development an appendix to Otakar Màcel, “Zur Theorie des that were consciously laid out.” (In Vittorio sozialistischen Relaismus in der Architektur”), Magnago-Lampugnani, ed., L’Avventura delle Archithese 19 (1976): 49–50 (special issue Idee—L’Architettura 1750–1980 [Milan: Electa, on “realism,” edited by B. Reichlin and M. 1985], 123–48.) Tafuri’s position with regard to Steinmann). The equation functionalism = the—grotesque, yet very real—debates about socialist realism in architecture would also be whether or not modern architecture lived up to the argument made, without great success, by the strict canons of socialist realism were, in any Hungarian architectural historian and member case, a bit casual, although entirely appropriate of CIAM, Màté Major, to defend the modern to the objects of his analysis, which, by and large, architecture of Le Corbusier, Gropius, and the also coincide with the subject of this essay. Bauhaus against the attacks of the Minister of Here, I will go no further than to indicate a few Education, Jozsef Réval, and the philosopher possible directions for study. “The capacity to Georg Lukács, at the ﬁrst national conference of integrate historical monuments with the image Hungarian architects in 1951 when Hungary of the new city, which may also involve a stylis- was already fully under a Communist regime tic interpretation of the historical heritage, was (see Akos Moravànszky, “Die Dorischen Säulen a prerogative of the masters of socialist realism des Ueberbaus: Die Architektur des ‘Sozial- in the architecture of the Soviet Union,” noted istischen Realismus’ in Ungarn im Spiegel einer Hannes Meyer in “Der Sowietische Architekt,” Diskussion zwischen Georg Lukács und Màté the manuscript version of an article destined for Major im Jahre 1951,” Um Bau (Vienna) 5 (Dec- Arquitectura (Mexico City) 9 (1942), repr. in ember 1981): 57–69). The Swiss art historian, Hannes Meyer, Bauen und Gesellschaft: Schriften, Georg Schmidt, later wrote in 1959 that “Sach- Briefe, Projekte, ed. Lena Meyer-Bergner (Dresden: lichkeit” was nothing other than the German VEB Verlag des Kunst, 1980), 312 ff. The seizure term for “realism” (Georg Schmidt, “Natur- of power by the Communists in Czechoslovakia alismus und Realismus” (1959), in Umgang mit in 1948 forced Karel Teige into a polemic with Kunst: Ausgewählte Schriften 1940–1963 [Olten: Karel Kramar concerning the realist—or, rather, Walter Verlag, 1966]). It is worth noting that the formalist—character of Cubism and led him to connection between realism and Sachlichkeit

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127822 by guest on 30 September 2021 had already been set forth by Peter Behrens in pfeng, 1902), after having distinguished monu- 1927 in a text devoted to the pioneering role of mental architecture from bourgeois architecture Carl Friedrich Schinkel. In “Zum Problem der (devoted to the everyday and to living) admitted technischen und tektonischen Beziehungen,” for the latter “eine realistische, rein nach dem Behrens was to say of the aspirations of his Bedürfnis zugeschnittene Gestaltung” (“a realist young colleagues that they are “entirely in the composition, strictly espousing needs”) (quoted spirit of Schinkel, since they want, as the real- in Julius Posener, Anfänge des Funktionalismus: ists that he was, nothing other than the objectiv- Von Arts and Crafts zum Deutschen Werkbund ity [Sachlichkeit] that today, in the ‘New [Berlin: Ullstein Bauwelt Fundamente, 1964], Objectivity’ [Neue Sachlichkeit], seems to have 158). Concerning “socialist realism” in archi- become the leitmotiv of our time” (Festreden: tecture, aside from the texts mentioned above, Schinkel zu ehren 1846–1980, ed. Julius Posener see, among others, Martin Steinmann, “Hans [Berlin: Fröhlich und Kaufmann, n.d.], 281–90). Schmidt: Zur Frage des Sozialistischen Peter Behrens was cited in turn as a defender of Realismus,” Werk 10 (October 1972); Jean-Louis the most consistent “realism” by Walter Curt Cohen, Marco De Michelis, and Manfredo Tafuri, Behrendt in Der Kampf um den Stil im Kunst- URSS 1917–1978: L’Architecture, La Ville gewerbe und in der Architektur (Stuttgart: (Paris: L’Equerre, 1979); and Jean-Louis Cohen, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1920), 78. Behrendt “Retrograd ou les impasses du réalisme ‘social- supports his point by mentioning the “fanciful iste’ en URSS,” in Les Années 30: L’architecture intentions” shown by the master in purchasing et les arts de l’espace entre industrie et nostalgie a large block of clay “upon which and in which (Paris: Editions du patrimoine, 1997). An essential he intended to sit as on a chair, with a view to resource is still found in Donald Drew Egbert, creating a ‘real’ form for a chair, which would Social Radicalism and the Arts: Western Europe, be esthetically perfect.” In the same essay, just a A Cultural History from the French Revolution few pages earlier, Behrendt clearly specifies to 1968 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970). what he meant by this new “‘realistiche’ Gestalt- 2. The literature on literary Neorealism is ungsprinzip”: a principle according to which “a boundless. An excellent lecture was delivered form is derived organically from the function for our group of architects by Dante Isella, pro- that it performs, as an artistic symbol of its own fessor at the Zurich Polytechnic, during the win- tectonic use” (52). Again, according to Behrendt, ter of 1976. See also Arnaldo Bocelli, La Nuova the expression “realist architecture” can be Enciclopedia della letterature Garzanti (Milan: traced back to Alfred Lichtwark, the tireless Garzanti, 1985). director of the Hanseatic Kunsthalle, who, in an 3. Champﬂeury (1821–1889) is considered one unpublished letter to Dr. Caesar Flaischlen of 5 of the founders of the realist school in art and December 1896, is said to have claimed that one literature (see his essay “Realism” of 1857). of the essential tasks he attempted as a researcher 4. Among the English translations of Gio- and pedagogue was the research and diffusion vanni Verga (1840–1922), see The House by of a “sachlich” architecture, i.e., a simple and the Medlar Tree, trans. Raymond Rosenthal functional architecture without decorative orna- (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); ment (see Hans Präffcke, Der Kunstbegriff Alfred Mastro-don Gesauldo: A Novel, trans. Giovanni Lichtwarks [Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1986], Cecchetti (Berkeley: University of California 303, n. 26). Hermann Muthesius, in Stilarchitek- Press, 1979); and Federico De Roberto (1861– tur und Baukunst (Mülheim-Ruhr: Schimmel- 1927), The Viceroys, trans. Archibald Colquhoun

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127822 by guest on 30 September 2021 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1962). 14. The Fanfani Law, passed in 1949 with a 5. Cited by Egbert, 82. view to ensuring work and a place to live for labor- 6. Italo Calvino, preface to the 1964 edition ers, was named after the Christian Democrat of The Path to the Spiders’ Nests (1947), trans. minister at the time, Amintore Fanfani. The text Archibald Colquhoun, rev. Martin McLaughlin of the law is reproduced in Controspazio 1 (Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco Press, 1998), 8–9. (September 1974): 91. Construction of housing 7. Gianni Rondolini, cited by Bruno Ventavoli actually did contribute to the increase in employ- in “Eravamo tutti neorealisti: Un clima diffuso, ment, as is shown, for instance, by the estimates non una scuola,” paper presented at the confer- reported by Norman Kogan, L’Italia del ence “Il Neorealismo tra cinema e storia, tra dopoguerra: Storia politica dal 1945 al 1966 culture e politica,” at the Fondazione Agnelli, (Rome: Laterza, 1968), 85. Between 1950 and published in La Stampa (Turin), 17 November 1959, major industry, based primarily in north- 1989. ern Italy, created only 120,000 jobs, while hous- 8. Alberto Farassino, cited in Ventavoli, n. 6. ing construction and transportation created 9. See the series of articles by Oreste del 400,000 to 500,000. The docudrama, Le Case Buono, “Amici Maestri,” La Stampa (Turin), July degli italiani [The Houses of the Italians], and August 1993 (“Il Duce applaudì ‘Ossessione’: directed by Vittorio Sala, celebrated, by follow- Visconti e le tante verità su un capolavoro”; ing the adventures of an engaged couple in search “Ossessione di Visconti annunciò l’altra Italia: of a place to live, the achievements of the Fanfani Fu vera la collera di Vittorio Mussolini?”; and Plan, which through INA-Casa led to the con- “Così Rossellini copiò Visconti: Desiderio construction of roughly 150,000 working class resi- tro ‘Ossessione’”). Freddy Buache (in Le Cinéma dences between 1949 and 1956 (see Gian Piero italien 1945–1979 [Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, Brunetta, Storia del cinema italiano, vol. 3: Dal 1979]) suggests, however, that Umberto Barbaro, Neorealismo al miracolo economico 1945–1959 professor at the Centro Sperimentale di Cine- [Rome: Editore Riuniti, 1982], 486). matografia and correspondent for the journal 15. Carlo Aymonino, “Storia e cronaca del Cinema was the first to use the term “Neorealism” Quartiere Tiburtino,” Casabella continuità 215 in connection with the cinema, in 1943. (April–May 1957): 20 (one of a number of arti- 10. Mario Alicata and Giuseppe De Santis, cles on the Tiburtino district in this issue). “Verità e Poesia: Verga e il cinema italiano,” Intended for roughly 5,000 inhabitants, the Cinema (1941), quoted in A. Asor Rosa and Angelo Quartiere Tiburtino was built between 1949 and Cicchetti, “L’Italia Unitaria—Roma: Nascita di 1954 by INA-Casa at kilometer seven on the Via un nuovo mito di Roma, il néorealismo,” in Tiburtina linking Rome with Tivoli, by a group Letteratura Italiana (Turin: Einaudi, 1982), 635. of Roman architects directed by Ludovico Emphasis added. Quaroni and Mario Ridolfi and assisted by Carlo 11. Mario Alicata and Giuseppe De Santis, Aymonino, Carlo Chiarini, Mario Fiorentino, “Ancora di Verga e del cinema italiano,” Cinema Federico Gorio, Maurizio Lanza, Sergio Lenci, (1941), quoted in Rosa and Cicchetti, n. 9. Pier Maria Lugli, Carlo Melograni, Gian Carlo 12. Cited in Ventavoli. Menichetti, Giulio Rinaldi, and Michele Valori. 13. The “Decalogo” [“Ten Commandments”] 16. See, in particular, Carlo Chiarini, “Aspetti are quoted in Neorealismo: Cinema italiano urbanistici del quartiere Tiburtino,” Casabella 1945–1949, ed. Alberto Farassino (Turin: E.D.T., continuità 215 (April–May 1957); and the 1977 1989), 130. interview with Ridolfi and Frankl in Hinterland

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127822 by guest on 30 September 2021 13–14 (1980). 33. Quote is from Alonge (45) who is, once 17. Federico Gorio, “Esperienze d’architettura again, paraphrasing Bazin. Bazin notes that De al Tiburtino,” Casabella continuità 215 (April– Sica’s “mise-en-scène aims at negating itself, at May 1957): 34. being transparent to the reality it reveals” (Bazin, 18. Aymonino, “Storia e cronaca del Quartiere vol. 2, 68). Tiburtino,” 20. 34. Barthes wrote: “[J]ust when these details 19. Giovanni Astengo, “Nuovi quartieri in are reputed to denote the real directly, all they Italia: Quartiere Tiburtino a Roma,” Urbanistica do—without saying so—is signify it; Flaubert’s 21, no. 7 (1951): 9-13. barometer, Michelet’s little door finally say noth- 20. Marcel Meili and Markus Peter, interview ing but this: we are the real; it is the category of with Wolfgang Frankl in “Durch die Abruzzen ‘the real’ (and not its contingent contents) which nach Rom: Eine architektonische Reise,” photo- is then signified” (“The Reality Effect,” 148). copied document distributed during research 35. Walter Siti, Il Neorealismo nella poesia trip for the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de italiana 1941–1956 (Turin: Einaudi, 1980), Zurich (l’ETHZ), 1993, 111–25. 22–24. 21. Meili and Peter, 111–25. Also in Federico 36. Siti, 51. The preceding examples and cita- Bellini, Mario Ridolfi (Rome: Laterza, 1993), 23 ff. tions are found in Siti, 23–47. 22. Meili and Peter, 117. 37. Ludovico Quaroni, “Il paese dei barocchi,” 23. G.E. Kidder-Smith, Italy Builds (New York: Casabella continuità 215 (April–May 1957): 24. Reinhold Publishing Corporation, 1955). 38. Quaroni, “Il paese dei barocchi,” 24. 24. Manfredo Tafuri, Ludovico Quaroni e lo 39. Ludovico Quaroni, “Caratteri di Roma” sviluppo dell’architettura moderna in Italia (1954) quoted in Manfredo Tafuri, Ludovico (Milan: Comunità, 1964), 94. Emphasis added. Quaroni, 190 n. 25. 25. Giaime Alonge, Vittorio De Sica: Ladri di 40. Italian architects’ interest in Scandinavian biciclette (Turin: Lindau, 1997). architecture dates to before the war. In 1938 26. Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” in Saverio Muratori published “Il movimento The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard architettonico moderno in Svezia,” Architettura (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), 141–148; and 2 (1938): 95–122. The example of Swedish resi- André Bazin, What is Cinema? vol. 2, trans. Hugh dential architecture was applied immediately Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, following the war in, for instance, the Roman 1971). neighborhood of Tuscolano by Saverio Muratori 27. Alonge, 39. and Mario De Renzi in 1949–1950. Bruno Zevi 28. Alonge, 44. devoted numerous pages of the journal Metron 29. Alonge, 46. Alonge is paraphrasing Bazin. to Scandinavian examples and in 1947 pub- See Bazin, “Bicycle Thief” in What is Cinema? lished a succinct monograph on Asplund in the vol. 2, 47–60. architectural series “Il Balcone,” published in 30. Alonge, 42–43. Milan. The term “neo-empiricism” was proba- 31. Luis Buñuel, from a conversation at the bly suggested by the English critic J.M. Richards University of Mexico in 1953, quoted in Paolo in the article “The New Empiricism: Sweden’s Nuzzi and Ottavio Iemma, De Sica e Zavattini: Latest Style,” Architectural Review 101 (June Parliamo tanto di noi (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1947): 199–204. The tempered rationalism of 1997), 203. Asplund, Gahn, Paulsson, Sundhal, and Markelius 32. Alonge, 50. preceded by at least fifteen years Italian archi-

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127822 by guest on 30 September 2021 tects’ turn toward a modest architecture, respect- Quadernie della Triennale, 1936). ful of the urban and landscape contexts. As early 43. The Garbatella is located between the as 1930 they wrote: “In a society, respect plays Via della Sette Chiese and the Circonvallazione an important role. A building must respect its Ostiense ring road, to the south, beyond the 1909 neighbors, which can live much longer than we city plan. Aniene is found north of the limits of might expect. However, respect does not consist this plan, between the Viale Gottardo, the Piazza in an imitation of style. Respecting the environ- Sempione, the Viale Carnaro, and the Viale ment means appropriately identifying the archi- Adriatico. Exceptionally, Manfredo Tafuri did tectural scale, the measures, the volumetrics, make reference to such developments in “Archi- the colors” (Acceptera [Stockholm: Bokförlag- tettura e Realismo”: “Some of the premises of saktiebolaget Tiden, 1931], quoted in Giovanna Italian architectural Neorealism of the forties and Massobrio and Paolo Portoghesi, Album degli ﬁfties are still here, in the experiences attained— anni 50 [Rome: Laterza, 1977], 204). This incite- not only in Rome—in the early twenties and in ment to moderation and the golden mean found their development over the two decades of fascist an echo and historic ampliﬁcation in Stern Eiler rule.” Tafuri was referring here to the activity of Rasmussen’s Nordische Baukunst (Berlin: Verlag the Istituto case popolari and other agencies such Ernst Wasmuth, 1940), which devoted a chapter as INCIS in Rome, and then to the superblocks to “Bescheidenheit ist eine Zier.” of the Trionfale III and then the Garbatella, the 41. For Bruno Zevi’s contribution, see, among former Piazza d’Armi, etc. See also Bellini, others, Zevi su Zevi: Architettura come profezia 72–73, 160–61. (Venice: Marsilio, 1993), as well as his countless 44. Piero Ostilio Rossi, Guida dell’architet- publications after the war in Metron: Architettura tura moderna a Roma 1909–1984 (Rome: Laterza, e urbanistica (1945–1954); in Comunità; and in his 1984), 27. (See the heading “Quartiere Garbatella.”) books such as Towards an Organic Architecture See also Gustavo Giovannoni, “L’espansione di (London: Faber and Faber, 1950) and Architecture Roma verso i colli e verso il mare,” Roma 12 as Space, rev. ed., trans. Milton Gendel (New (January–February 1934): 159–60; and the com- York: Da Capo, 1993). In 1945 Zevi founded the mentary by Ludovico Quaroni on the “Magliana “Association for Organic Architecture,” which nuova,” a workers’ village at the gates of Rome was primarily cultural and pedagogical. (by Mario de Renzi), in Architettura 4 (April 42. See for example the catalogue of the 1940): 187–98. exhibition Architettura rurale italiana, eds. 45. Rossi, 27. Giuseppe Pagano and Guarniero Daniel (Milan: 46. Meili and Peter, in Bellini, 21.

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