Italian Imprints on Twentieth-Century Architecture

Denise Costanzo, Andrew Leach

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350257740
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: History of Architecture

Italian architecture has long exerted a special influence on the evolution of architectural ideas elsewhere - from the Beaux-Arts academy's veneration of Rome, to modernist and postmodern interest in Renaissance proportion, Baroque space, and Mannerist ambiguity. This book critically examines this enduring phenomenon, exploring the privileged position of Italian architects, architecture, and cities in the architectural culture of the past century. Questioning the deep-rooted myth of Italy within architectural history, the book presents case studies of Italy's powerful yet problematic position in 20th-century architectural ideologies, at a time when established Eurocentric narratives are rightly being challenged. It reconciles the privileged position of Italian architecture and design with the imperative to write history across a more global, diverse, heterogenous cultural geography. Twenty chapters from distinguished international scholars cover subjects and architects ranging from Alberti to Gio Ponti, Aldo Rossi, Manfredo Tafuri, Vittorio Gregotti; cities from Rome and Venice to Milan; and an array of international architects, movements, and architectural ideas influenced by Italy. The chapters each question where, how, and why the disciplinary edifice of 20th-century architecture-its canon of built, visual, textual, and conceptual works-relied on Italian foundations, examining where and how those foundations have become insecure. Indispensable for students and scholars of both Italian and global architectural history, Italian Imprints on Twentieth-Century Architecture provides an opportunity to consider the architectural and urban landscape of Italy from substantially new points of view.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Imprints and Tracks
• 2 The Architect as Intellectual
• 3 Italian Afterthoughts: Transcoding Veniceness from Without
• 4 Italy as a Methodological Testing Ground for Architectural History
• 5 Functionalism and its Italian Entanglements
• 6 The Italian Renaissance as Rebirth and Return
• 7 From Renaissance Precision to Computational Uncertainty
• 8 The Human Body as a Space of Diplomacy: Studi sulle proporzioni at the IX Milan Triennale in 1951
• 9 Models and Methods of Architecture and Climate
• 10 “Slow Down Your Kunstwollen, Young Man” or, What a Practice in Building Deconstruction Learned From Tuscan Aristotelianism
• 11 Robert Venturi and Naples: The Complexity of the South
• 12 Gio Ponti: A Cloud of Affinities
• 13 Marking, Framing, and Measuring (in) Vittorio Gregotti’s Il territorio dell’architettura
• 14 Aldo Rossi, Giorgio de Chirico, and the Enigma of Tradition
• 15 Furnishing Fascist Italy
• 16 The International Call: Italian Design, Culture, Politics, and Economics at the 1972 MoMA Exhibition and Beyond
• 17 Appropriating Aldo Rossi: The Displaced Afterlife of L’architettura della città in China
• 18 From the Universal to the Particular: Robin Boyd and the Positioning of Italy in Postwar Architectural Criticism
• 19 Unexpected Pedagogies: Henry Hornbostel in Italy, 1893
• 20 Italian Roots in Latin American Architectural History
• Index
• Plates
• Copyright