Forms & Structures
Research project “Forms and Structures” explores the design culture of the fifties and sixties from the historical perspective with particular emphasis on hybridization between engineering and architecture.
The interweaving of relationships, and sometimes the roles, has produced a series of works and projects of high artistic and scientific value, blurring the boundaries between these two disciplines. The study of this period, by its main protagonists in relation with their results, could be used to develop a reflection on the elements of architecture today.
Historical analysis becomes a tool of proposition and enhancement of a way of making architecture-aware, conscious of the need and knowledge of building systems and their functional and expressive potential, a kind of architecture in which matter and technique find their role in the
service of space and form.
The historical analysis becomes also a fertile ground of experimentation, adding to traditional research methods on direct sources - such as magazines and the writings from the studied period - the contemporary design tools, the three-dimensional modelling and the static analysis, to reinstate an analytical framework based on the selection of works with symbolical value that have characterized one entire season of design culture.
The period of the most intense development and fusion of various disciplines coincides with the post-war period, the period of the great development and diffusion of form-resistant structures, which have been very soon adopted for ideological and representative purposes on international level.
The new importance of shell structures in the structural design culture internationally can be well noted also at the urban scale: mostly located
to implement the large scale projects of the reconstruction and urbanization, becoming an icons and functional absorbers.
Moreover, these structures have met the new demands emerged from the post-war debate, such as the themes of the new monumentality and contamination with art, which have often appeared in CIAM discussions and in texts as Architektur und Gemeinschaft Sigfried Giedion (1956).
Brought almost to the technological limits, buildings have reached high level of technical and poetical quality.
That was the period of the maximum tension, generated by the Cold War, and expressed by the frantic race of the “space race” scientific discovery.
Therefore architecture couldn’t avoid becoming field of experimentation for itself.
The technology and the improvement of social standards are the main topics of the collision between the two orders divided by the “Iron Curtain”.
In the scenarios generated by this “clash”, countries have adopted the modern language in different ways, enriching it with symbols and meanings strongly adapted to their specific material, political and cultural realities.
The point of crisis of this particular design season is situated between the late Sixties and the Seventies. Therefore, it is related to the new modernization scenarios of change and influenced by the productive transformations, technological innovations in the field of mass communications and professional reorganizations increasingly influenced by the use of computers and new digital technologies in general.
