Neorealist Architecture

Neorealist Architecture PDF Author: David Escudero
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000713652
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
***Winner of the American Association for Italian Studies Book Prize 2022*** After World War II, a wave of Italian films emerged that depicted the life and hardships of characters left helpless after the conflict, bringing to the screen the struggles of a time of existential angst and uncertainty. This form of filmmaking was associated with a broader artistic phenomenon known as ‘neorealism’ and is now considered a pivotal point in the history of Italian cinema. But neorealism was not limited to film any more than it was to literature. It spread to other areas of artistic production, including architecture. What was, then, neorealist architecture? This book explores the links between architecture, filmmaking and the built environment in dopoguerra Italy (194X–195X) seeking to ascertain whether, and how, neorealism manifested itself in architecture. Terms such as ‘neorealist architecture’ or ‘architectural neorealism’ were hinted at in these years and recalled by historians of architecture in the following decades. Therefore, the concept was adopted ad hoc and popularized post hoc, in the absence of any declarations prior to 1955 that proclaimed what neorealism in architecture was or wanted to be. However, while the concept has been internalized by Italian architectural history, transfers between neorealism—as an aesthetic and ethic—and architecture—as one potential medium of its embodiment or expression—are still not fully understood. Therefore, its main goal is to provide an in-depth discussion of the concept ‘neorealist architecture’, the working assumption being that the connection between both terms is not meaningless. The book is beautifully illustrated with over 100 black and white archival images and is the first book to be published on neorealism in architecture. It will appeal to scholars, professionals, and students interested in history and theory of architecture, Italian studies, art history, and cultural studies.

Neorealist Architecture

Neorealist Architecture PDF Author: David Escudero
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000713652
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Get Book Here

Book Description
***Winner of the American Association for Italian Studies Book Prize 2022*** After World War II, a wave of Italian films emerged that depicted the life and hardships of characters left helpless after the conflict, bringing to the screen the struggles of a time of existential angst and uncertainty. This form of filmmaking was associated with a broader artistic phenomenon known as ‘neorealism’ and is now considered a pivotal point in the history of Italian cinema. But neorealism was not limited to film any more than it was to literature. It spread to other areas of artistic production, including architecture. What was, then, neorealist architecture? This book explores the links between architecture, filmmaking and the built environment in dopoguerra Italy (194X–195X) seeking to ascertain whether, and how, neorealism manifested itself in architecture. Terms such as ‘neorealist architecture’ or ‘architectural neorealism’ were hinted at in these years and recalled by historians of architecture in the following decades. Therefore, the concept was adopted ad hoc and popularized post hoc, in the absence of any declarations prior to 1955 that proclaimed what neorealism in architecture was or wanted to be. However, while the concept has been internalized by Italian architectural history, transfers between neorealism—as an aesthetic and ethic—and architecture—as one potential medium of its embodiment or expression—are still not fully understood. Therefore, its main goal is to provide an in-depth discussion of the concept ‘neorealist architecture’, the working assumption being that the connection between both terms is not meaningless. The book is beautifully illustrated with over 100 black and white archival images and is the first book to be published on neorealism in architecture. It will appeal to scholars, professionals, and students interested in history and theory of architecture, Italian studies, art history, and cultural studies.

The Routledge Companion to Italian Fascist Architecture

The Routledge Companion to Italian Fascist Architecture PDF Author: Kay Bea Jones
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000061442
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 719

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Book Description
Today, nearly a century after the National Fascist Party came to power in Italy, questions about the built legacy of the regime provoke polemics among architects and scholars. Mussolini’s government constructed thousands of new buildings across the Italian Peninsula and islands and in colonial territories. From hospitals, post offices and stadia to housing, summer camps, Fascist Party Headquarters, ceremonial spaces, roads, railways and bridges, the physical traces of the regime have a presence in nearly every Italian town. The Routledge Companion to Italian Fascist Architecture investigates what has become of the architectural and urban projects of Italian fascism, how sites have been transformed or adapted and what constitutes the meaning of these buildings and cities today. The essays include a rich array of new arguments by both senior and early career scholars from Italy and beyond. They examine the reception of fascist architecture through studies of destruction and adaptation, debates over reuse, artistic interventions and even routine daily practices, which may slowly alter collective understandings of such places. Paolo Portoghesi sheds light on the subject from his internal perspective, while Harald Bodenschatz situates Italy among period totalitarian authorities and their symbols across Europe. Section editors frame, synthesize and moderate essays that explore fascism’s afterlife; how the physical legacy of the regime has been altered and preserved and what it means now. This critical history of interpretations of fascist-era architecture and urban projects broadens our understanding of the relationships among politics, identity, memory and place. This companion will be of interest to students and scholars in a range of fields, including Italian history, architectural history, cultural studies, visual sociology, political science and art history.

Adalberto Libera

Adalberto Libera PDF Author: Francesco Garofalo
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
ISBN: 9781568983448
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Photographs, drawings, and text describe over 70 projects of Italian architect Libera (1903-63), a pioneer of modern Italian architecture, who flourished during the Fascist period. Black and white. No index. First published in Italian, 1989. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The Architecture of Rome

The Architecture of Rome PDF Author: Ulrich Fürst
Publisher: Edition Axel Menges
ISBN: 9783930698608
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 668

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Book Description
Architects and artists have always acknowledged over the centuries that Rome is rightly called the 'eternal city'. Rome is eternal above all because it was always young, always 'in its prime'. Here the buildings that defined the West appeared over more than 2000 years, here the history of European architecture was written. The foundations were laid even in ancient Roman times, when the first attempts were made to design interiors and thus make space open to experience as something physical. And at that time the Roman architects also started to develop building types that are still valid today, thus creating the cornerstone of later Western architecture. In it Rome's primacy remained unbroken -- whether it was with old St Peter's as the first medieval basilica or new St. Peter's as the building in which Bramante and Michelangelo developed the High Renaissance, or with works by Bernini and Borromini whose rich and lucid spatial forms were to shape Baroque as far as Vienna, Bohemia and Lower Franconia, and also with Modern buildings, of which there are many unexpected pearls to be found in Rome. All this is comprehensible only if it is presented historically, i. e. in chronological sequence, and so the guide has not been arranged topographically as usual but chronologically.This means that one is not led in random sequence from a Baroque building to an ancient or a modern one, but the historical development is followed successively. Every epoch is preceded by an introduction that identifies its key features. This produces a continuous, lavishly illustrated history of the architecture of Rome -- and thus at the same time of the whole of the West. Practical handling is guaranteed by an alphabetical index and detailed maps, whose information does not just immediately illustrate the historical picture, but also makes it possible to choose a personal route through history.

Designing Memory

Designing Memory PDF Author: Sabina Tanović
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108486525
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
This innovative study of memorial architecture investigates how design can translate memories of human loss into tangible structures, creating spaces for remembering. Using approaches from history, psychology, anthropology and sociology, Sabina Tanović explores purposes behind creating contemporary memorials in a given location, their translation into architectural concepts, their materialisation in the face of social and political challenges, and their influence on the transmission of memory. Covering the period from the First World War to the present, she looks at memorials such as the Holocaust museums in Mechelen and Drancy, as well as memorials for the victims of terrorist attacks, to unravel the private and public role of memorial architecture and the possibilities of architecture as a form of agency in remembering and dealing with a difficult past. The result is a distinctive contribution to the literature on history and memory, and on architecture as a link to the past.

Film, Architecture and Spatial Imagination

Film, Architecture and Spatial Imagination PDF Author: Renée Tobe
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315533715
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
Films use architecture as visual shorthand to tell viewers everything they need to know about the characters in a short amount of time. Illustrated by a diverse range of films from different eras and cultures, this book investigates the reciprocity between film and architecture. Using a phenomenological approach, it describes how we, the viewers, can learn how to read architecture and design in film in order to see the many inherent messages. Architecture’s representational capacity contributes to the plausibility or 'reality' possible in film. The book provides an ontological understanding that clarifies and stabilizes the reciprocity of the actual world and a filmic world of illusion and human imagination, thereby shedding light on both film and architecture.

Florence, Venice & the Towns of Italy

Florence, Venice & the Towns of Italy PDF Author: Robert Kahn
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 9781892145017
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
If a standard guidebook has never revealed the Italy you seek, let City Secrets show you the way. See the glorious art and architecture of Italy's villages and cities through the eyes of the people who know them best: an architect leads you through a hidden Florence passageway built for the Medici; a novelist points out the panoramic vistas that inspired St Francis; the most renowned of Italian cooks divulges her favourite Venetian eateries; and an artist directs you to the courtyard of a Renaissance convent, where you will ring for access to the frescoes - and a miraculous handprint - that lie within.

Italian Locations

Italian Locations PDF Author: Noa Steimatsky
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 081665087X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Fascism and the Second World War left Italy indelibly changed, and cinema was arguably the art that most rigorously confronted the devastated nation. In this examination of four Italian filmmakers, Noa Steimatsky brilliantly maps their forceful negotiation of Italy’s identity and posits that the cinematic forms they employ constitute an imaginary reinhabiting of Italy-one that is inextricably linked with the political, physical, and symbolic predicament of reconstruction. A dynamic intersection of pictorial and photographic, architectural and literary discourses inform Steimatsky’s revisionist interrogation of exemplary works from the 1940s to the mid–1960s. From the earliest documentary work of Michelangelo Antonioni on the River Po to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s re-siting of the Gospel in the arid, peripheral landscape of the Italian south, and from Roberto Rossellini’s tracing of a neorealist project in ruinous Berlin to Luchino Visconti’s wrought grandeur visited upon a humble Sicilian fishing village, Italian Locations probes the historical experience of displacement, anachronism, and a thoroughly contemporary anxiety in the cinematic arena. For Steimatsky, Antonioni’s modernist achievement, informed by his native landscape, Rossellini’s neorealist image of Italy as a nation of ruins, Visconti’s reaching back to the nineteenth century and even more archaic pasts, and Pasolini’s ambivalence about modernity-all partake in a search for a politically and culturally redeemed Italy. Noa Steimatsky is associate professor of the history of art and film studies at Yale University.

Architecture of Great Expositions 1937-1959

Architecture of Great Expositions 1937-1959 PDF Author: Rika Devos
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317179102
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
This book investigates architecture as a form of diplomacy in the context of the Second World War at six major European international and national expositions that took place between 1937 and 1959. The volume gives a fascinating account of architecture assuming the role of the carrier of war-related messages, some of them camouflaged while others quite frank. The famous standoffs between the Stalinist Russia and the Nazi Germany in Paris 1937, or the juxtaposition of the USSR and USA pavilions in Brussels 1958, are examples of very explicit shows of force. The book also discusses some less known - and more subtle - messages, revealed through an examination of several additional pavilions in both Paris and Brussels; of a series of expositions in Moscow; of the Universal Exhibition in Rome that was planned to open in 1942; and of London’s South Bank Exposition of 1951: all of them related, in one way or another, to either an anticipation of the global war or to its horrific aftermaths. A brief discussion of three pre-World War II American expositions that are reviewed in the Epilogue supports this point. It indicates a significant difference in the attitude of American exposition commissioners, who were less attuned to the looming war than their European counterparts. The book provides a novel assessment of modern architecture’s involvement with national representation. Whether in the service of Fascist Italy or of Imperial Japan, of Republican Spain or of the post-war Franquista regime, of the French Popular Front or of socialist Yugoslavia, of the arising FRG or of capitalist USA, of Stalinist Russia or of post-colonial Britain, exposition architecture during the period in question was driven by a deep faith in its ability to represent ideology. The book argues that this widespread confidence in architecture’s ability to act as a propaganda tool was one of the reasons why Modernist architecture lent itself to the service of such different masters.

Reconstructing Italy

Reconstructing Italy PDF Author: Stephanie Zeier Pilat
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317070291
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
Reconstructing Italy traces the postwar transformation of the Italian nation through an analysis of the Ina-Casa plan for working class housing, established in 1949 to address the employment and housing crises. Government sponsored housing programs undertaken after WWII have often been criticized as experiments that created more social problems than they solved. The neighborhoods of Ina-Casa stand out in contrast to their contemporaries both in terms of design and outcome. Unlike modernist high-rise housing projects of the period, Ina-Casa neighborhoods are picturesque and human-scaled and incorporate local construction materials and methods resulting in a rich aesthetic diversity. And unlike many other government forays into housing undertaken during this period, the Ina-Casa plan was, on the whole, successful: the neighborhoods are still lively and cohesive communities today. This book examines what made Ina-Casa a success among so many failed housing experiments, focusing on the tenuous balance struck between the legislation governing Ina-Casa, the architects who led the Ina-Casa administration, the theory of design that guided architects working on the plan, and an analysis of the results-the neighborhoods and homes constructed. Drawing on the writings of the architects, government documents, and including brief passages from works of neorealist literature and descriptions of neorealist films by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italo Calvino and others, this book presents a portrait of the postwar struggle to define a post-Fascist Italy.