292 / 540
•
International cultural context
Architecture in postwar Italy
Local university training
The configuration of the “Italian Axis”
t was the postwar period, and the Western powers were in the process of reconstruction and realignment.
The United States of America experienced its time of glory, and as the victor it had a massive impact on
global culture. International masters such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, and Mies van der Rohe
were carrying out their latest works, leading the way for figures such as Eero Saarinen, Louis Kahn, Skid-
more, Owings and Merrill, Paul Rudolph, and Aldo van Eyck. The revolutionary atmosphere was palpable,
and it would extend its detonations in the 1960s with groups such as Team X and Archigram, followed by the
extraordinary works of Foster, Piano, and Rogers—the Pompidou Museum, for example. The 1950s witnessed
the emergence of Latin America and the groundbreaking exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art—Niemey-
er, Costa, Villanueva, Barragán, Ramírez Vázquez, Romañach, Bermúdez, Vegas, Salmona, Zabludowsky,
Testa, and a long list of others.
These were years of great cultural intensity and monumental political changes in which the phrase “any-
thing goes” apparently took hold, and which seems to prevail to this day. Italy experienced a uniquely pow-
erful rebirth in modern architecture, this time also embracing engineering. Pier Luigi Nervi stands out in
particular, in his work a structural designer who fused architecture, engineering, and construction into a sin-
gle discipline. His projects highlighted the Rome Olympics in 1960; they transformed Turin and other cities
that received their elegant and amazing structures. Other authors excelled with their exquisite works: Franco
Albini, whose Rinascente building in Rome opened to the delight of many; Giovanni Michelucci, the famous
Florentine architect behind the Chiesa della Autostrada; the visionary Carlo Scarpa, Venetian of universal
character, with his detailed architecture and his design characterized by a highly refined taste. These were the
years of the awakening of Italian industrial design, initially so concentrated in Milan, with its links to firms such
as Flos, Artemide, Cassina, Poltrona Frau, IGuzzini, etc.
According to the monographic magazine
2G
, Issue No. 15 (
Italian Postwar Architecture 1944 - 1960
) edited by
Luca Molinari and Paolo Scrivano:
After the idiosyncrasies experienced by the introduction of the modern movement in fascist Italy,
architectural production of the country was reborn after World War II. The modern movement com-
bined with a more local vision linked to a strong historical tradition and to the construction in well-es-
tablished historic cities. During these years, Italy became a bulwark of modern world architecture that
CHAPTER 27
The Italian Training of Modern
Dominican Architects, 1950 - 2019
By Gustavo Luis Moré
Director of the magazine
Archivos de Arquitectura Antillana