{"id":10141,"date":"2014-10-05T19:47:27","date_gmt":"2014-10-05T17:47:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.area-arch.it\/franco-albini-and-the-reconstruction-of-the-city-of-parma-method-and-the-rule-2\/"},"modified":"2015-06-21T20:09:32","modified_gmt":"2015-06-21T18:09:32","slug":"franco-albini-and-the-reconstruction-of-the-city-of-parma-method-and-the-rule","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.area-arch.it\/en\/franco-albini-and-the-reconstruction-of-the-city-of-parma-method-and-the-rule\/","title":{"rendered":"Franco Albini and the reconstruction of the city of Parma: method and the rule"},"content":{"rendered":"

Parma July 12 2013<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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 \u201cabnormal\u201d 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 \u2013 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.\u00a0At 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 \u201ctheoretical\u201d references to the typical sources of Moderism, that were never expressly challenged but had by then become extraneous, to the \u201cideograms\u201d of the early masters, of the \u201cinvention of the rule of doing\u201d; 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 \u201cas something heavy in dark water\u201d, 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 \u2013 throughout the fifties \u2013 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 \u201crule\u201d of architectural design, which is – like every conventual rule – transmissible, moralistic, obstinate (and these are the vices, hopes and virtues of Albini\u2019s work), may prove reductive, variable, sudden and \u2013 sadly \u2013 tainted by incoherence. This is not the case of the \u201crationalist method\u201d 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 \u201cbefore\u201d, in the identification of an own \u201crule for building\u201d, that inclination to a poetic application of a \u201cproblem to solve\u201d (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 \u2013 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, \u00a0perhaps initially unconscious), to embark towards a patient elaboration of an architecture \u2013 that has later been recognized as having passed through its time \u2013 asserting the distinctive traits of the architectural profession in our country.\u00a0Albini 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 \u201crule\u201d 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 \u2013 certainly schematic but \u201crealistic\u201d \u2013 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 \u201cbasement\u201d with equally shaded portals (like in Samon\u00e0\u2019s INA building\u00a0in Treviso), to the lamellate, detached cornice (almost like in Gardella\u2019s 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\u00a0the 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.
\nMy story as student standing outside the fence of the building site of the urban building in Via Cavour, oscillating between rationalist \u201cmethod\u201d and \u201crule\u201d 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.\u00a0Albini 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 \u201crule of doing\u201d could, by then, be considered as a fait accompli: beyond the fence the \u201cdesign\u201d 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 \u201crationalist method\u201d. 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.
\nThe 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 \u2013 bordering on the outer limits of the building \u2013 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 \u201cgiraffe\u201d effect of the Lombard master builders, described with discontent by the Brianza-style frenzy of engineer Gadda. Helg\u2019s \u201csecondary\u201d design on the outer edges of the building defined a frame with a \u201csparing superimposition\u201d 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 \u201cscore of the already built\u201d. The \u201cdecorated\u201d 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.\u00a0The \u201cdecorated\u201d limit \u2013 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 \u2013 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 \u201cdifferent\u201d dimension, at the same time uninhibited and aloof, in the final analysis feminine.
\nThe 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 \u201cmantle\u201d which established, with its force and naturalness, the permanency of the reasons of the place, saving, with an elegant (and agreed-on?) gesture \u2013 the placement of a frame – Albini\u2019s 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 \u2013 in the early sixties \u2013 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.\u00a0An unexpected metamorphosis \u2013 weighty and declamatory \u2013 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 \u201crationalist\u201d compositive programme extended to the building organism conceived as a whole, to go beyond that \u201csuspension of judgment\u201d 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.
\nThe in-depth analysis of Albini\u2019s work in the years immediately following World War II was to be concluded with the positive novelty that \u201crings\u201d 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 \u2013 precisely that of the INA building \u2013 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.<\/p>\n