area 129 | urban architecture

Parma July 12 2013

My initiation to architecture as a student took place by the fence around the INA Building site in Via Cavour in my home town. Watching from the outside, I followed Franco Albini’s building as it gradually took form. I read it with the reassuring scheme of interpretation that was taught at that time at the Milan Polytechnic, and where it has never, as far as I know, been contested: the new building had to grow, showing respect for the local conditions and the programmed functions, or express an articulated dialectic process, in the more heteronomous case. These definitions were necessary and sufficient to establish the context of a proper rationalist rule. In the building in Parma, which was begun in 1950, designed immediately after the “abnormal” experiment with the Pirovano mountain hut in Cervinia (begun in 1948) and shortly before the Treasury of the S. Lorenzo in Genoa (begun in 1952), the orthogonal grid represents the incipit of the orthodoxy through which the modularity appears, accomplished in its formal datum, as precisely in the case of Pirovano – with a repetition of the geometric elements that is, true, structural, but that is above all representative of itself, of its intrinsic processuality. It is a matter of an ideologizing procedural datum, attributable, during the long period of the Modern Movement, to the European roots of Rationalism, which have given rise to the modulation, the grid, the abstract structure of the composition which begins with the tapering stone colonnade of the Pirovano shelter and continues with the portals framed by tapered pillars in reinforced concrete of the INA building in Parma. At that moment the architecture of Franco Albini, with its concrete and smooth accentuation of the functional aspects, its clever dovetailing of materials, its full exploitation of the constructive possibilities of the elements and their techniques, was in the forefront of the disciplinary innovation in our country. It was therefore a matter of a necessary adoption, conditioned by the “theoretical” references to the typical sources of Moderism, that were never expressly challenged but had by then become extraneous, to the “ideograms” of the early masters, of the “invention of the rule of doing”; of the new rule that had already been expressed in an architecture, that of the Fifties, where the geometric references to modulation remain, but gradually fade “as something heavy in dark water”, in the depth of the crystalline fluid. Naturally, the connections established by the modular grid still remain for the purpose of demonstrating belongingness to a movement: the CIAMs and the MSA; yet they remain there, confined on paper (drawing paper) and are no longer instrumental to a possible future. Certainly, geometry is mother of the structural datum. It renders the most consolidated image of the project and lends itself demonstratively, remaining – throughout the fifties – as the standardized trace of the relationship between form and function; but tradition outweighs original ideograms, postulating a search for a critical operation that is to re-establish unity and consciousness to relationships of value and practice. Albini, who became a leading figure in those years, nevertheless remained fascinated with geometric, and then textural, effects, as shown by the works developed before the Sixties, which continue and develop designs characterized by complex interactions, where the modular rhythm becomes the backdrop of a story of architecture based on new principles. The “rule” of architectural design, which is - like every conventual rule - transmissible, moralistic, obstinate (and these are the vices, hopes and virtues of Albini’s work), may prove reductive, variable, sudden and – sadly – tainted by incoherence. This is not the case of the “rationalist method” always evoked in his teachings due to the descriptive characters of logic intelligibility, but always kept at bay, in his postwar work, in the conviction of being able to reach “before”, in the identification of an own “rule for building”, that inclination to a poetic application of a “problem to solve” (architectural design, precisely), according to the history-proven rules of the art. The assumption of the significances (or, if we prefer, the message of the completed work) becomes charged, in the course of the Fifties, - between rule and method – with divergent references, first fleeting and then concrete. The responsibility for the traditions, technical and above all historical, which is first placed between parentheses and then in the forefront, transforms the initial technological rational moralizing accents into tense allusions to the conceptual delimitation of the work and an awareness that it might become possible to overcome it. It is at this point that the reasons of design explore a path that is not so much aimed at an assertion of principles, of an utopia, as at a research of the individual case; of the abnormality (of the evolutionary variation, of a conceptual framework of reference, true or presumed,  perhaps initially unconscious), to embark towards a patient elaboration of an architecture – that has later been recognized as having passed through its time – asserting the distinctive traits of the architectural profession in our country. Albini here gives form and substance to a series of works in progress, lending force in terms of image and continuity to his moment in history, to legitimately confront his own near past, in the very same moment in which his thin-lead pencil traces a merely wishful diagram in the air, suggesting a future development. It is a matter of a structural grid that is intrinsic to a “rule” for architecture which traces evolutionary lines, by small moves, based on the technical comprehension that has already been tested in western Emilia (from Albini in his INA building in Parma to Manfredini in his Seminary of Reggio, for instance), to correspond directly to a civil practice of architecture within the horizon – certainly schematic but “realistic” – of a school of regional architecture which has, since the early Fifties, also animated by prospects of young scholar. In Parma, in the urban building, from the grading of the composition from the ground upwards, achieved with the “basement” with equally shaded portals (like in Samonà’s INA building in Treviso), to the lamellate, detached cornice (almost like in Gardella’s House by the Park), to the inclination of the pillars on the roof (according to a configuration dear to Ridolfi, as of the project in Viale Etiopia in Rome), we discover the debts and mutual understandings among the architects of the postwar period; but also the shared appreciation of a new orientation, that is not expressed, still theoretically, or referable to an exclusive school, among the group of intellectuals who worked and reflected on shared themes that were didactically and demonstratively comparable; measured on structural and technical nodes and on the gradual reconsideration of the expressivity of the materials, who all worked with a formal inclination (crossing paths) engages from the same starting point. Among these, the programme of Albini enunciates, as origin of the progressive tapering of pillars in reinforced concrete, the Miesian model of the structures of the Promontory Apartments in Chicago. From here Albini moves within an own line that, from the heretic (but rule-abiding) Pirovano, leads to the re-examination of rationalist principles conducted with the INA building, in a research that contemplates, in a crescendo, the reasons of the place and the physicality of the materials, in order to reflect more closely the peculiarity of the themes (to the point of the historicism of the Treasure of Genoa). Architecture now assumes, in a positive sense, the consistency, weight and use of these materials (traditional or innovative), replacing the abstraction of the rationalist dictate with the grammar of a new realism: the row of tapered granite pillars, divided in segments and scales, supporting the rascard frame of the dwelling modules of the Pirovano, the structure formed of portals, pillars, beams in reinforced concrete with non-structural walls in lozenge-shaped sanded facing brick in the INA building in Parma, the oloi in massive Finale stone in the S. Lorenzo. Thus in Parma, the theme of the office building is necessarily enriched by the civic reasons of the city, without omitting the political message of the reconstruction. The building site represents an intervention on the cardo of the bombed city, building on the block where the houses of De Adam, demolished to make room for that Baptistery which is awaiting its partial and modern periphrasis beyond the fence, once stood. Gradually, as the structure grows, it relates to the place, to the old terracotta, to the thicknesses and the cuts of the Verona stone that changes form, with the light, in the course of the day. With it, the reasons for an architecture that keeps in touch with the materials used grows, and the schemes change, from conceptual (and utopian) to material (and concrete), of the work that is being erected alongside angular colonnades, loggias with architraves, sequences of different masonry surfaces arranged below a by now fourteenth-century pinnacle crowning. Here Albini gives the single compositive scores new meanings by revealing the historic processuality of the work of Lombardy: made of a composition of finite elements, that can be broken up in parts, articulated in a building site sequence, vivacious in terms of the colours of the masonry elements and the decorative parts.
My story as student standing outside the fence of the building site of the urban building in Via Cavour, oscillating between rationalist “method” and “rule” of the factory, one bright morning, while the construction had by now arrived at the roof, saw the elegant figure of Franco Albini enter the building site, from the side by Borgo S. Biagio, accompanied by Franca Helg. She was an apparition in a blue striped suit; she seemed to fly and she followed him with rolls of drawings held up by a Swiss-Milanese posture. Albini manifested an uneasy attitude, countered by Her pragmatic, perhaps somewhat haughty indifference. I asked myself whether the articulated dialectic process between conditions, functions, organism within the correct rationalist rule had not perhaps jammed (many years later Helg herself confirmed my doubts). As of that date, it was 1954, I realized that my apprenticeship to the “rule of doing” could, by then, be considered as a fait accompli: beyond the fence the “design” of Italian architecture, by now outlined as to practice and the material, from Albini and Gardella, and, as to idea, by Ernesto Rogers, prevailed on the logical intelligibility of the “rationalist method”. In Parma the work had taken root; the geometric rule, acquiring material substance, had found a position that was culturally appropriate to the expectations of the urban and national reconstruction. New and different interlocutions wielded their influence on the culture and profession of architecture and the line of rationalism proved receptive to the flattery of an adaptation to the setting, and moderated the theoretical orientation that had sustained it.
The visit of that morning served for a consultation, to examine the blind fronts of the new building and how they related to the profiles of the existing buildings, which are for that matter still visible today, in the model preserved at the site. The result had to help Albini to harmonize the unproportioned areas – bordering on the outer limits of the building – with the modular scores of the rhythm of the exterior, expressed in their metallic smoothness, almost assembly elements to observe against the light; themselves blades of light, clear-cut and thin lesenes, rather than pillars. Beyond the fence, Franco Albini perceived the “giraffe” effect of the Lombard master builders, described with discontent by the Brianza-style frenzy of engineer Gadda. Helg’s “secondary” design on the outer edges of the building defined a frame with a “sparing superimposition” of the construction elements that had already been used on the main facades, underscoring their decorative properties in the very same moment as they were subtracted from the “score of the already built”. The “decorated” limit underscored the point of the interaction between the building bodies, utilizing a lozenge pattern made with sanded bricks, in a minimalistic strategy not unlike a play with tapestries (decorative, precisely), between accentuated elements and structures and evident non-structural panels. The “decorated” limit – in its material texture: lozenge-shaped bricks like those in the old barns on the plains, alternated by smoothed plastering, concrete frames left in view, wooden grating on iron frames – grew around the elliptic stairwell, to underscore the coherence that had been lost by the Albinian abstraction, to recover an original relationship between the elements of the composition, in a “different” dimension, at the same time uninhibited and aloof, in the final analysis feminine.
The versatility of the compositive interactions in the face of the missing contact with the existing environment; the worry and fear, of a rationalistic architect, for the attachment to the ground where the work is to stand and establish the continuous, perennially tormented relationship with the surroundings, had been resolved by Helg with the installation of a gentle line around the Baptistery, a decorated “mantle” which established, with its force and naturalness, the permanency of the reasons of the place, saving, with an elegant (and agreed-on?) gesture – the placement of a frame - Albini’s architecture from the hesitations of a rationalism that was no longer determinant. What was being opened during this construction, as the building site proceeded, was a path to the relationship between the building and the city, which was to be continued some years later in Rome – in the early sixties – with the Rinascente department stores. In fact, it is in the modularity of the INA building in Parma that one can still retrace the visual impact of the structural grid of the first draft of the project, based on the repetition of an abstract metallic portal with three hinges (and to interior, more fretful technological and typological aspirations), which change in contact with the generic and indolent Roman building norm to arrive, not long afterwards, to the doric trabeation of the definitive solution. An unexpected metamorphosis – weighty and declamatory – but felicitously protagonist of a part of the city placed on the edges of the Aurelian walls, which also reveals an Albini who is able to take a step back with respect to a “rationalist” compositive programme extended to the building organism conceived as a whole, to go beyond that “suspension of judgment” that was already in the air, in the Sixties, on the fundamental values of Modernist architecture and experiment with a scenic front of excellence, those concurrent relations, between technique, form-colour and definitions of new spatial arrangements which were then, by gemmation, to arrive in north-western Emilia, in the Zoja Baths of Salsomaggiore (1964) in a markedly scanned project which was to repeat its basic elements.
The in-depth analysis of Albini’s work in the years immediately following World War II was to be concluded with the positive novelty that “rings” in the S. Lorenzo in Genoa (but which was then to become the silent muse of prestigious museum designs). The further research, which was to arrive in Parma once again in the Casa Corini (1967-70) where the modularity, softened by the terracotta decoration, once again calls forth the memory of a cloister vault, was to leave behind the evident references to a poeticism that had by then been attained (the museum of the Treasure will always remain an outstanding peak of the Twentieth century), to instead wonder about the advancements that may be inferred from the experience of Parma – precisely that of the INA building – in an attempt to attribute the spatial arrangements, still referable to primogenial rationalism (and they are all there) to the formative agreement in which the reasons of composing aimed to evade the rules, true or only presumed, perhaps indeterminate, of the International Style. It is on the path staked out by the realism of the building in Via Cavour in Parma, by Albini, by Helg, that the architecture of the Italian city of the twentieth century, and our attempts as scholars following in their footsteps, have been built.

This text is elaborated from a lecture at the convention on Rationalism in the city of Parma, held in the Philosophers’ auditorium of the University at the time when the architecture was being set up,
on a theme outlined by Marco Dezzi Bardeschi.