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.

Italian Neorealism

Italian Neorealism PDF Author: Mark Shiel
Publisher: Wallflower Press
ISBN: 9781904764489
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 156

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Book Description
Italian Neorealism: Rebuilding the Cinematic City is a valuable introduction to one of the most influential of film movements. Exploring the roots and causes of neorealism, particularly the effects of the Second World War, as well as its politics and style, Mark Shiel examines the portrayal of the city and the legacy left by filmmakers such as Rossellini, De Sica, and Visconti. Films studied include Rome, Open City (1945), Paisan (1946), The Bicycle Thief (1948), and Umberto D. (1952).

Architecture and Ugliness

Architecture and Ugliness PDF Author: Wouter Van Acker
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350068241
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Whatever 'ugliness' is, it remains a problematic category in architectural aesthetics – alternately vilified and appropriated, used either to shock or to invert conventions of architecture. This book presents sixteen new scholarly essays which rethink ugliness in recent architecture – from Brutalism to eclectic postmodern architectural productions – and together offer a diverse reappraisal of the history and theory of postmodern architecture and design. The essays address both broad theoretical questions on ugliness and postmodern aesthetics, as well as more specific analyses of significant architectural examples dating from the last decades of the twentieth century. The book attends to the diverse relations between the aesthetic register of ugliness and closely connected aesthetic concepts such as the monstrous, the ordinary, disgust, the excessive, the grotesque, the interesting, the impure and the sublime. This volume does not simply document the history of a postmodern anti-aesthetic through case studies. Instead, it aims to shed light on aesthetic problems that have been largely overlooked in the agenda of architectural theory. This book answers in detail the questions: How did postmodern architects appropriate troublesome contradictions bound to the raw ugliness of the real? How have the ugly and the antiaesthetic been a productive force in postmodern architecture? How can ugliness be of value to architecture? And how can architecture make good use of ugliness?

Suspending Modernity: The Architecture of Franco Albini

Suspending Modernity: The Architecture of Franco Albini PDF Author: Kay Bea Jones
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317048040
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
Franco Albini’s works of architecture and design, produced between 1930 and 1977, have enjoyed a recent revival but to date have received only sporadic scholarly attention from historians and critics of the Modern Movement. A chorus of Italian voices has sung his praises, none more eloquently than his protégé, Renzo Piano. Kay Bea Jones’ illuminating study of selected works by Studio Albini will reintroduce his contributions to one of the most productive periods in Italian design. Albini emerged from the ideology of Rationalism to produce some of Italy’s most coherent and poetic examples of modern design. He collaborated for over 25 years with Franca Helg and at a time when professional male-female partnerships were virtually unknown. His museums and installation motifs changed the way Italians displayed historic artifacts. He composed novel suspension structures for dwellings, shops, galleries and his signature INA pavilions where levity and gravity became symbolic devices for connoting his subjects. Albini clarified the vital role of tradition in modern architecture as he experimented with domestic space. His cohort defied CIAM ideologies to re-socialize postwar housing and speculate on ways of reviving Italian cities. He explored new fabrication technologies, from the scale of furniture to wide-span steel structures, yet he never abandoned the rigors of craft and detail in favor of mass-production. Suspending Modernity follows the evolution of Albini’s most important buildings and projects, even as they reveal his apprehensive attitudes about the modern condition. Jones argues here that Albini’s masterful use of materials and architectural expression mark an epic paradigm shift in the modern period.

The Italian Cinema Book

The Italian Cinema Book PDF Author: Peter Bondanella
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1839020245
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 734

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Book Description
THE ITALIAN CINEMA BOOK is an essential guide to the most important historical, aesthetic and cultural aspects of Italian cinema, from 1895 to the present day. With contributions from 39 leading international scholars, the book is structured around six chronologically organised sections: THE SILENT ERA (1895–22) THE BIRTH OF THE TALKIES AND THE FASCIST ERA (1922–45) POSTWAR CINEMATIC CULTURE (1945–59) THE GOLDEN AGE OF ITALIAN CINEMA (1960–80) AN AGE OF CRISIS, TRANSITION AND CONSOLIDATION (1981 TO THE PRESENT) NEW DIRECTIONS IN CRITICAL APPROACHES TO ITALIAN CINEMA Acutely aware of the contemporary 'rethinking' of Italian cinema history, Peter Bondanella has brought together a diverse range of essays which represent the cutting edge of Italian film theory and criticism. This provocative collection will provide the film student, scholar or enthusiast with a comprehensive understanding of the major developments in what might be called twentieth-century Italy's greatest and most original art form.

Cinematic Rome

Cinematic Rome PDF Author: Richard Wrigley
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1906510288
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
This collection is based on the papers given at a conference at the University of Nottingham in September 2005. The conference was intended to explore Rome as a site for the making of films, and also its changing role as a setting for cinematic narrative. The resulting collection of essays will contribute to the burgeoning genre of studies on cinema and the city, by focusing on one particularly rich case study both for the nature of the films discussed, and the complexities of the city and its representation. The volume will also reach beyond film studies in so far as the subject draws on and informs other approaches to Rome's cultural history (geography, art history, urban history, classics).The essays address topics ranging from the interwar period to the present. A diverse set of cinematic interactions and interventions are placed within the context of the evolving architectural, social and political fabric of Rome in a period of rapid and often traumatic historical change. Implicit in the conception of the conference was the idea that cinematic representations of the city inherit and rework established habits of visualisation used to produce images of the Eternal city. Three other tropes which constitute key elements in Rome's international reputation can be seen as being embedded in cinematic narratives. Firstly, the trope of transformation - artisic, narratives.Firstly, the trope of transformation -artisic, psychological, spiritual; secondly, the city's reputation as a cosmopolitan crossroad. Thirdly, Rome's status as a locus classicus for the juxtaposition of the ancient and the modern, which was given a new relevance and complexity in films which sought to focus on aspects of contemporary life, be it in the Fascist era, or the extreme contrasts of poverty and international bohemianism of the postwar era.

Civic Realism

Civic Realism PDF Author: Peter G. Rowe
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262681056
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Topics covered in the book include the role of the state and civil society in the construction of civic spaces, aesthetic and architectural dimensions of realism, individual and collective uses of urban space, and how civic places constitute as well as represent the civic aspects of our lives. The examples, mostly from the modern period, include recent public spaces in Barcelona, several of the Grand Projects in Paris, neorealist projects in postwar Rome, contemporary transformations of the Manhattan grid, and Plecnik's water axis in prewar Ljubljana.

Schooling in Modernity

Schooling in Modernity PDF Author: Paola Bonifazio
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442615982
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Paola Bonifazio investigates the ways in which films sponsored by Italian and American government agencies promoted a particular vision of modernization and industry and functioned as tools to govern the Italian people.

Reconstructing Italy

Reconstructing Italy PDF Author: Stephanie Zeier Pilat
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317070305
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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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.

Paolo Portoghesi

Paolo Portoghesi PDF Author: Silvia Micheli
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350117153
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Through the work of the Italian architect, theorist and historian Paolo Portoghesi (1931-2023), this book offers a new perspective on postmodern architecture, showing the agency of other spheres of knowledge – history, politics and media – in the making of postmodern architectural discourse. It explores how Portoghesi's personal “postmodern project” was based on the triangulation of a renewed interest in historical architectural language, unprecedented use of media and intertwined links between architecture and politics. Organized in a sequence of critical chapters supported by the analysis of Portoghesi's most significant architectural projects – including Casa Baldi (1959), The Mosque in Rome (1975–95) and his Strada Novissima exhibition (1980) – and publications, the book unfolds around the three main themes of history, politics and media. Published as part of the Bloomsbury Studies in Modern Architecture series, which brings to light the work of significant yet overlooked modernist architects, the study features previously-unpublished archival material, interviews by the authors and articles from professional and mainstream press to present Portoghesi in his multifaceted role of mediator, politician, historian and designer.