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The Architecture of Modern Italy, Volume II: Visions of Utopia, 1900-Present
This groundbreaking and authoritative two-volume survey is the first truly comprehensive history of modern Italian architecture and urbanism to appear in any language. Told in lively prose, it recounts more than 250 years of experimentation, creativity, and turmoil that have shaped the landscape of contemporary Italy.
Volume Visions of Utopia, 1900Present , tracks the development of Italys architectural avant-garde through the upheavals of the twentieth century. Beginning with the development of Italian art nouveau--"stile liberty"--and moving through futurism, fascism, rationalism, and on to the creative experimentation of the present day, it explores the work of such pivotal figures as Raimondo dAronco, Antonio SantElia, Adalberto Libera, Giuseppe Terragni, Pier Luigi Nervi, Gio Ponti, Carlo Scarpa, Aldo Rossi, and Renzo Piano.
The Architecture of Modern Italy is exhaustively illustrated with rare period images, new photography, maps, drawings, and plans. With Colin Rowe's Italian Architecture of the 16th Century , it provides a nearly complete overview of the history of Italian architecture.
Volume Visions of Utopia, 1900Present , tracks the development of Italys architectural avant-garde through the upheavals of the twentieth century. Beginning with the development of Italian art nouveau--"stile liberty"--and moving through futurism, fascism, rationalism, and on to the creative experimentation of the present day, it explores the work of such pivotal figures as Raimondo dAronco, Antonio SantElia, Adalberto Libera, Giuseppe Terragni, Pier Luigi Nervi, Gio Ponti, Carlo Scarpa, Aldo Rossi, and Renzo Piano.
The Architecture of Modern Italy is exhaustively illustrated with rare period images, new photography, maps, drawings, and plans. With Colin Rowe's Italian Architecture of the 16th Century , it provides a nearly complete overview of the history of Italian architecture.
- GenresArchitecture
280 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2005
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January 10, 2023
In this important two-volume work The Architecture of Modern Italy, Terry Kirk's intention is to offer "a better understanding of the transformation of the Italian tradition in the modern age". Covering a wide range - from alterations to the Pantheon in the 1700s to the 1935 competition for Florence Railway Station - he moves surefootedly among debates and events, beginning from descriptions of the first buildings for hydro-electric power. He identifies Giambattista Nolli's 1748 Plan of Rome as "the starting point of modern architecture", and moves on to the Royal Palace at Caserta (Luigi Vanvitelli, 1751) with its vast garden: "Vanvitelli defined an imperial idiom for his day that dismantled regional inflections through the Herculean force of classicism".
Kirk exhorts readers to realise "Italy is not a museum", but it was largely foreign visitors who enabled Italy to become the source of inspiration for western architecture, and Kirk discusses the Grand Tour at length. Other less benign foreigners have also held parts of Italy under occupation; there are interesting chapters on architectural developments under the Austrians and the French. Kirk's account of how Giuseppe Piermarini was commissioned by Maria Theresa of Austria to build the La Scala, in 1778, gives space to the relationship between music and architecture. The second book terminates with an account of the new Rome Auditorium (2002), on which Renzo Piano closely collaborated with the conductor Claudio Abbado.
In 1805 Napoleon Bonaparte took over in Milan, and Kirk devotes a long section to Italy’s napoleonic period, including Giovanni Antolini's magnificent Foro Bonaparte, which transformed the whole centre of the city. Contemporaneous neoclassical transformations in Trieste, Milan, Venice, Turin, Naples, and Rome are described in detail. In Florence, the neoclassical influence was strongly felt in urban plannng as the city walls were demolished in 1864, and Giuseppe Poggi built new avenues and plazas, opening up the city for expansion.
Writing about the work of more recent architects like Carlo Scarpa, Kirk seems to be on shakier critical ground. He acknowledges Scarpa's indebtedness to Wright, but doesn't discuss Scarpa's rigorous strategic approach to spatial design, which is greatly indebted to De Stijl. He is in better form when writing about builders in earlier periods, such as the work in Piedmont of the engineer-architect Alessandro Antonelli. A master of construction, Antonelli possessed the skill to design highly original structural systems like that of the cupola at San Gaudenzio in Novara (1841), where "rigidity and stiffness are guaranteed by a series of five perforated parabolic cones that stiffen the walls like the structure of a bamboo shoot".
It is with Italy's first imperial adventures in Libya and Abyssinia that we most strongly sense gaps in Kirk's investigations. He misses out entirely the enormous subject of colonial Italian architecture, and tells us nothing about the important architectural and urban planning developments that took place in Africa. His account of the Fascist period is limited to Italy only, and has good coverage of the tug-of-war between Rationalists and Neoclassicists, where he adroitly balances discussion of the northern Rationalist Gruppo 7 with an account of the different developments farther south in Rome, where Adalbero Libera, Mario Ridolfi and Giuseppe Vaccaro designed some of the most significant buildings of Fascist construction programmes, such as the post offices in Rome and Naples. Kirk also mentions the other power struggles that took place between so-called "regime" architects like Armando Brasini and Marcello Piacentini, and is careful to explain what the "Case del Fascio" typology was all about before he begins his analysis of Giuseppe Terragni's famous Casa del Fascio in Como.
Post-WW2, reconstruction began with a new architectural theory of fragmentation and breaking things up, orchestrated by the firebrand critic Bruno Zevi, who "provided an intellectual path out of the anxiety of Fascist continuities". Zevi's polemical essays, which were regularly published and were widely influential, exhorted architects to prefer disjointed plans and informal, broken-up spatial arrangements that eschewed the neoclassical axiality of so much fascist architecture.
Amazingly, Giancarlo de Carlo is not mentioned in the book, but Kirk does give good coverage to the enlightened industrialist Adriano Olivetti, who made the industrial Olivetti town of Ivrea into a showpiece for new architecture.
The final section of the second volume, "After Modernism" focuses perhaps too much on developments in Rome, whilst the work of interesting Milanese practitioners like Cino Zucchi is ignored. Renzo Piano and Massimiliano Fuksas are given the treatment they deserve. It would have been useful to have a more comprehensive account of how non-Italian architects have been working in Italy. Zaha Hadid's Maxxi museum in Rome,and a church by Richard Meier, are mentioned, but projects elsewhere by Hadid, David Chipperfield, Norman Foster, and others, are overlooked.
Kirk's two books are far from flawless, but they bring together, for the first time in English, much that was until now only available in Italian. They are far richer than can be described here, and marked a renewal in the discussion of modern architecture in Italy by non-Italians; they are still an essential reference for anyone seriously interested in the subject.
Kirk exhorts readers to realise "Italy is not a museum", but it was largely foreign visitors who enabled Italy to become the source of inspiration for western architecture, and Kirk discusses the Grand Tour at length. Other less benign foreigners have also held parts of Italy under occupation; there are interesting chapters on architectural developments under the Austrians and the French. Kirk's account of how Giuseppe Piermarini was commissioned by Maria Theresa of Austria to build the La Scala, in 1778, gives space to the relationship between music and architecture. The second book terminates with an account of the new Rome Auditorium (2002), on which Renzo Piano closely collaborated with the conductor Claudio Abbado.
In 1805 Napoleon Bonaparte took over in Milan, and Kirk devotes a long section to Italy’s napoleonic period, including Giovanni Antolini's magnificent Foro Bonaparte, which transformed the whole centre of the city. Contemporaneous neoclassical transformations in Trieste, Milan, Venice, Turin, Naples, and Rome are described in detail. In Florence, the neoclassical influence was strongly felt in urban plannng as the city walls were demolished in 1864, and Giuseppe Poggi built new avenues and plazas, opening up the city for expansion.
Writing about the work of more recent architects like Carlo Scarpa, Kirk seems to be on shakier critical ground. He acknowledges Scarpa's indebtedness to Wright, but doesn't discuss Scarpa's rigorous strategic approach to spatial design, which is greatly indebted to De Stijl. He is in better form when writing about builders in earlier periods, such as the work in Piedmont of the engineer-architect Alessandro Antonelli. A master of construction, Antonelli possessed the skill to design highly original structural systems like that of the cupola at San Gaudenzio in Novara (1841), where "rigidity and stiffness are guaranteed by a series of five perforated parabolic cones that stiffen the walls like the structure of a bamboo shoot".
It is with Italy's first imperial adventures in Libya and Abyssinia that we most strongly sense gaps in Kirk's investigations. He misses out entirely the enormous subject of colonial Italian architecture, and tells us nothing about the important architectural and urban planning developments that took place in Africa. His account of the Fascist period is limited to Italy only, and has good coverage of the tug-of-war between Rationalists and Neoclassicists, where he adroitly balances discussion of the northern Rationalist Gruppo 7 with an account of the different developments farther south in Rome, where Adalbero Libera, Mario Ridolfi and Giuseppe Vaccaro designed some of the most significant buildings of Fascist construction programmes, such as the post offices in Rome and Naples. Kirk also mentions the other power struggles that took place between so-called "regime" architects like Armando Brasini and Marcello Piacentini, and is careful to explain what the "Case del Fascio" typology was all about before he begins his analysis of Giuseppe Terragni's famous Casa del Fascio in Como.
Post-WW2, reconstruction began with a new architectural theory of fragmentation and breaking things up, orchestrated by the firebrand critic Bruno Zevi, who "provided an intellectual path out of the anxiety of Fascist continuities". Zevi's polemical essays, which were regularly published and were widely influential, exhorted architects to prefer disjointed plans and informal, broken-up spatial arrangements that eschewed the neoclassical axiality of so much fascist architecture.
Amazingly, Giancarlo de Carlo is not mentioned in the book, but Kirk does give good coverage to the enlightened industrialist Adriano Olivetti, who made the industrial Olivetti town of Ivrea into a showpiece for new architecture.
The final section of the second volume, "After Modernism" focuses perhaps too much on developments in Rome, whilst the work of interesting Milanese practitioners like Cino Zucchi is ignored. Renzo Piano and Massimiliano Fuksas are given the treatment they deserve. It would have been useful to have a more comprehensive account of how non-Italian architects have been working in Italy. Zaha Hadid's Maxxi museum in Rome,and a church by Richard Meier, are mentioned, but projects elsewhere by Hadid, David Chipperfield, Norman Foster, and others, are overlooked.
Kirk's two books are far from flawless, but they bring together, for the first time in English, much that was until now only available in Italian. They are far richer than can be described here, and marked a renewal in the discussion of modern architecture in Italy by non-Italians; they are still an essential reference for anyone seriously interested in the subject.
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