Histories of Postwar Architecture

Ecumenical Village of Agàpe

Ilaria Cattabriga — 2023-02-01

“My life as an architect is but an episode of my inner life, an ordinary act like so many acts make up our day”: a Letter to Tullio Vinay

Leonardo Ricci — 2023-02-01

Flowers Market of Pescia

Ilaria Cattabriga — 2023-02-01

Fausto Maria Ricci House

Ilaria Cattabriga — 2023-02-01

Arnaldo Ricci House

Ilaria Cattabriga — 2023-02-01

Balmain House

Ilaria Cattabriga — 2023-02-01

Hon. Pleydell Bouverie House

Ilaria Cattabriga — 2023-02-01

F. D. Roosevelt Memorial

Ilaria Cattabriga — 2023-02-01

The Bourgeois in Revolt against Themselves. Cultural Revolution in the U. S.

Leonardo Ricci — 2023-02-01

Goti Factory

Ilaria Cattabriga — 2023-02-01

Dei Leggieri Theatre

Ilaria Cattabriga — 2023-02-01

Staging of “Espressionismo: pittura scultura architettura”

Ilaria Cattabriga — 2023-02-01

“A Sculpture that Allows a Journey through Expressionism”: a Reply to Nello Ponente

Leonardo Ricci — 2023-02-01

“Orfeo” Scenographies and Dressing

Ilaria Cattabriga — 2023-02-01

Architecture in Relationship to the Other Arts

Leonardo Ricci — 2023-02-01

Macrostructure for an Integrated Town

Ilaria Cattabriga — 2023-02-01

Staging of the Costume Sector in the Italian Pavilion of Expo 67

Ilaria Cattabriga — 2023-02-01

Directional Center of Florence

Ilaria Cattabriga — 2023-02-01

Savona Palace of Justice

Ilaria Cattabriga — 2023-02-01

Erratum: The Urban Imaginary in Doha, Qatar

Peter Chomowicz — 2023-02-01

Mercato dei Fiori in Pescia (1948-1951): Design Inventiveness and Constructional Experimentation in Italy after the Second World War

Micaela Antonucci — 2023-02-01

After the Second World War, Italy shifted within a few years from post-war reconstruction to the economic “boom”, attracting international attention with a series of highly original works and extraordinary examples of structural and constructional experimentation despite a strong technological delay compared to other industrialised countries.
In the immediate aftermath of the war, projects in which formal invention was closely linked to innovation in materials and structures developed all over Italy, creating a “built catalogue” of experimental techniques. Brick was among the materials that were widely available and deeply rooted in the traditional building. Indeed, the development of the so-called “reinforced brick” in the interwar period had paved the way to the construction of thin, light structures that could be built saving time and costs.
One of the first and most significant Italian experiments with this material was the Mercato dei Fiori (Flowers Market) in Pescia, Tuscany. It was the work of a team composed of architects Giuseppe Giorgio Gori, Leonardo Ricci, Leonardo Savioli, and Enzo Gori, along with the engineer Emilio Brizzi. The presence of four architects and one engineer in the group meant that the two aspects of the project – design and construction – were both thoroughly studied and intimately connected. This was the key to the successful combination of structural boldness and formal originality that made this building a case study in post-war Italian architecture and also earned it international fame. This structure still remains an important testimony to a formidable period of constructional experimentation in post-war Italy; the analyses of its material and structural aspects, which have not been considered so far by scholarly studies on either the building or its authors, represent fundamental investigative tools for fully understanding its value and innovation.
The paper proposes an analysis of the Market’s space and compositional principles relying upon a deep understanding of its structural conception, since the simplicity and lightness of the final result were only possible thanks to the innovative adoption of technological solutions that were widely known but still used infrequently or in different settings.

Towards the Macrostructure. Leonardo Ricci’s Ideas for the Unbuilt Pleydell Bouverie House (1958-1960)

Beatrice Conforti — 2023-02-01

The essay tries to make more widely known the project of the Pleydell Bouverie House, which was designed by Leonardo Ricci in 1958-60 but never built. In addition, to describe the drawings, many of which have been put in a new light thanks to the Centenary of the architect’s death, the text attempts to use the description of two other realized works to highlight certain characteristics. This is also supported by some three-dimensional diagrams produced during the analysis of the project. These diagrams are part of a wider research carried out by the author of the essay within the dissertation The density of space. Forms of living in the work of Leonardo Ricci at the Department of Architecture Theories and Design of La Sapienza University of Rome. The assumption is that, through this house in particular, Ricci tested architectural elements and strategies aimed at the realization of the macrostructure. A comparison is made with the Cardon House in Castiglioncello and, at the same time, with the building La Nave in the Sorgane district, in Florence. We find this approach interesting in order to imagine both the origins of certain ideas and what the results of the realization of Pleydell Bouverie House might have been. The present paper, therefore, tries to provide not only a description of a single-family house that Ricci never built, but to contribute with a precise observation of certain aspects, aimed at placing this work in the broader discussion of Leonardo Ricci’s approach and vision about architecture.

Leonardo Ricci and the Project for the “Man-Machine Space”: the Goti Factory (1959)

Ilaria Cattabriga — 2023-02-01

The Goti factory is a civil architecture, built between 1959 and 1960, when Ricci was managing to translate into reality some fundamental principles of his spatial research: the design method of the "form-act", the community ideal and the anonymous, relational and existential architecture. This text aims to frame the project in Ricci’s work and clarify these design ideals and how they are found in the analyzed project, exploiting the reading of archival sources and contemporary projects or with a similar program. Furthermore, the Goti Factory is placed in the years in which Ricci begins an intense exchange with the United States, which will allow him to approach the founding theories of Urban Design, therefore to resolve, thanks to them, that tension between opposites that animated his research, finally reaching the definitive evolution of his design method.

A Project for the Synopia of the Integrated City. MODEL I: Harbor-Center with Water-Sea-Earth Communication Routes

Ilaria Cattabriga — 2023-02-01

This paper wants to introduce Leonardo Ricci’s project for the integrated town identifiable on two kinds of archival series: the pictures of a three-dimensional model titled MODEL I: Harbor-center with water-sea-earth communication routes kept in Casa Studio Ricci in Florence and the bidimensional drawings kept in CSAC (Centro Studi e Archivio della Comunicazione) Archive, by framing it in his architectural work and research of the Sixties, which saw an intense exchange with the United States. It will be outlined in its fundamental aspects by explaining firstly the theoretical then the applied research Ricci dedicated to the elaboration of the model, as he maybe would have presented it according to its strong belief in the intertwining between these two layers. The final part will deal with a comparison of the analyzed project to the coeval model for the “Casa Abitata” exhibition, presented one year before in Florence. Both models show the same purposes and final similar morphological results, the first elaborated in the United States, the second one in Italy, as a consequence of Ricci’s research for a synthesis between architecture and sculpture and as a necessary melting between the physical and the social structures, thus the search for the most livable and useful spaces for the best development of modern life.

Staging of the Costume Sector in the Italian Pavilion of Expo 67 in Montréal, Canada (1966-1967). From “Urschrei” to “Correalism”. Considerations on Some Motifs in Leonardo Ricci (1962-1967)

Matteo Cassani Simonetti — 2023-02-01

The design of the Italian pavilion at Expo 67 in Montréal, Canada (1966-1967) was the result of a choral effort which involved Giulio Carlo Argan, Cosimo Carlucci, Umberto Eco, Leoncillo Leonardi, Bruno Munari, the Passarelli studio, Arnaldo Pomodoro, Leonardo Ricci, Carlo Scarpa, Emilio Vedova and Bruno Zevi.
Leonardo Ricci designed the Staging of the costume sector by creating cavernous concretions that housed an exhibition curated by Umberto Eco. The interpretation proposed here, focuses on the formal genealogies of the work, trying to contextualise its birth in the Florentine cultural context during the 1960s and within Ricci’s research.

Leonardo Ricci’s Palace of Justice in Florence. A Desolate Fragment of an Urban Ideal (1987-1994)

Lorenzo Mingardi — 2023-02-01

The paper traces the political and design events that led the city of Florence and FIAT to involve numerous architects in 1985 for the construction of a new district on the area owned by the car manufacturer. In addition to various office and commercial buildings, the city’s Palace of Justice would also be built here. Coordinated by Lawrence Halprin and Bruno Zevi, the architects - Leonardo Ricci, Ralph Erskine, Roberto Gabetti and Aimaro Isola, Luigi Pellegrin, Aldo Loris Rossi, Richard Rogers, Walter Di Salvo, Iginio Cappai and Pietro Mainardis, Gunnar Birkerts and Piero Paoli - drew up an urban plan for the area during three workshops (1987-1988). Leonardo Ricci (initially accompanied by Giovanni Michelucci) is responsible for the design of the Palace of Justice, which will be the only building constructed in the district.
Using unpublished documentation, the paper focuses on the purely political reasons why the neighbourhood could not be realised, leaving Ricci’s building as a desolate fragment of an urban ideal.

Too Good to Be True: the Savona Courthouse

Vittorio Pizzigoni — 2023-02-01

The article analyzes the Palace of Justice of Savona designed and built by Leonardo Ricci between 1972 and 1987, highlighting its aspirations and design motivations. In particular, the main aim is to trace the reasons why both the building and the area it occupies are now so degraded in the surrounding conditions of the project.

New Research on Leonardo Ricci’s Archives

Ilaria Cattabriga — 2023-02-01