Priscila Lena Farias / Anna Calvera Marcos da Costa ... - Blucher

Designing ‘The House of Man’: Franco Albini and the place of Neorealism in
Italian Design, 1930-1960
MEKINDA, Jonathan / PhD / University of Illinois at Chicago / United States
Italian Design / Neorealism / Modernism
Generally characterized as Neorealist, a term derived from the
work of such filmmakers and writers as Roberto Rossellini and
Italo Calvino, postwar Italian culture is typically believed to have
diverged significantly from Fascist culture in both its subjects
and its techniques. Contrary to this story, this paper will argue
that Italian design, and Neorealism more broadly, is more accurately
understood as the product of existing lines of research
and debate.
1. ‘The House of Man’
In late 1945, the architect Ernesto Rogers began what would prove
to be a relatively short term as the editor of Domus, the famed journal
of architecture and design that Gio Ponti had founded in 1928.
Under Ponti’s direction, Domus had become one of the premier design
magazines in Italy, aimed at the growing urban middle-class
and functioning very much as a guide to modern good taste. Rogers,
however, imagined an entirely different role for the magazine.
In his first editorial in January 1946, in the first issue of Domus
published since 1941 when Ponti had stepped down, Rogers announced
a new set of concerns:
On every side the house of man is cracked (if it were a boat we
would say it leaks). On every side the voices of the wind enter and
the laments of women and children go out. A house is no house
if it is not warm in winter, cool in summer, and serene in every
season to receive the family in harmonious spaces. A house is no
house if it does not contain a corner for reading poetry, an alcove,
a bathtub, a kitchen. This is the house of man. And a man is no man
if he does not possess such a house. 1 [Rogers 1993]
These lines hint at the broad cultural concerns that Rogers aimed
to engage with the magazine, concerns that he made explicit in
his concluding sentences:
The house is a problem of limits (like, for that matter, almost every
other problem of existence). But the definition of these limits is a
problem of culture, and this is precisely what the house is in the
end (like, indeed, the other problems of existence)…. It is a matter
of forming a style, a technique, a morality as terms of a single
function. It is a matter of building a society. 2 [Rogers 1993]
1 The original Italian reads: ‘Da ogni parte la casa dell’uomo è incrinata (fosse un
vascello diremmo che fa acqua). Da ogni parte entrano le voci del vento e n’escono
pianti di donne e di bimbi. Una casa non è casa se non è calda d’inverno, fresca
d’estate, serena in ogni stagioni per accogliere in armoniosi spazi la famiglia.
Una casa non è casa se non racchiude un angolo per leggere poesie, un’alcova,
una vasca da bagno, una cucina. Questa è la casa dell’uomo. E un uomo non è
veramenta uomo finché non possiede una simile casa.’
2 The original Italian reads: ‘La casa è un problema di limiti (come del resto quasi
ogni altro dell’esistenza). Ma la definizione dei limiti è un problema di cultura e
proprio ad esso si riconduce la casa (come, infatti, gli altri dell’esistenza)…. Si
tratta di formare un gusto, una tecnica e una morale, come termini di una stessa
funzione. Si tratta di costruire una società.’
With this brief editorial, barely 2 pages long, Rogers defined the
damage caused by both Fascism and the war in simple poetic
terms that resonated widely across Italian culture. At the same
time, he articulated the central role that the home would play
in the work of Italian architects and designers in the decade or
so that followed the war. This engagement with the domestic
sphere was necessitated by the need to address the extensive
damage caused by the war and to confront the severe housing
shortage that had plagued the country since long before the war.
But, this concern for the home was more than purely utilitarian
and after the war the ‘casa’ became the subject of intense
scrutiny as a space essential to the formation of a democratic
culture. As Roger’s himself recognized, the home, what he called
“The House of Man,” was not just a matter of shelter, but a matter
of building a society.
2. Defining Neorealism
Italian architects’ focus on the home, and the life that occurred
therein, coincided with the rise of a broader language of cultural
expression after the war known as Neorealism. Exemplified by
films such as Rossellini’s Rome, Open City and De Sica’s The Bicycle
Thieves, as well as novels such as The Path to the Spiders’
Nests by Italo Calvino, Neorealism was defined by the rejection
of grand historical narratives, elaborate settings, and sophisticated
editing techniques, in favor of the direct and continuous
narration of stories taken from the everyday life of ordinary Italians.
3 Through these new subjects and new techniques, Rossellini,
Calvino, and their peers aimed to engage the difficult reality
of postwar Italy directly as both an escape from the myths of
Fascism and a contribution to the construction of a new society.
Like most such terms, Neorealism was the invention of critics,
who already by 1947 were using it to describe the films and novels
made in the aftermath of the war. The term quickly gained
popularity, however, and was soon adopted widely to describe
the culture of postwar, post-fascist Italy. By the mid-1950s Neorealism
was even being used to describe the architecture and
design work that followed in the wake of Rogers’s 1946 editorial.
Writing in 1956, for instance, the young Aldo Rossi and Guido
Canella described the postwar work of their mentor Mario Ridolfi
as ‘immersed in that atmosphere of modern Rome that Neorealist
cinema and literature had so well penetrated,’ 4 [Canella
and Rossi 1956: 55] and in 1958 the architect Paolo Portoghesi
3 The films are Roberto Rossellini, Roma, città aperta of 1945 and Vittoria De Sica, I
ladri di biciclette of 1947. The novel is Italo Calvino Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno, first
published in 1947.
4 The original Italian reads: ‘Questi edifici [The blocks at viale Etiopia] portana
nel colore gli accenti drammatici della tavolozza di un Guttuso e sono immersi in
quella atmosfera della Roma moderna che cinema e letteratura neo-realista hanno
così ben penetrato.’
Design Frontiers: Territiories, Concepts, Technologies / Proceedings of the 8th Conference of the International Committee for
Design History & Design Studies - ICDHS 2012 / São Paulo, Brazil / © 2012 Blucher / ISBN 978-85-212-0692-7