El Grupo 7 en la formación de la arquitectura racionalista italiana : 1927-1930

The thesis examines the formation, the individual and collective facts and the works accomplished by Group 7, fundamental character in the short but important season of Italian architecture from 1926 to 1931. In 1926 the group is established by Giuseppe Terragni, Luigi Figini, Gino Pollini, Carlo Enrico Rava, Sebastiano Larco, Guido Frette, Ubaldo Castagnoli, soon substituted by Adalberto Libera, in Milan, the most economically active and most industrialized area of the country. Since the beginning the group turns to Europe, addressing and following the most relevant exponents of the modern movement, especially the German architects and Le Corbusier. The objective pursued is the modernization of architecture in Italy, both in language and of the society, thanks to new theories and new building techniques, constantly updated. The reform purpose is declared via the publication of four program-articles (1926-27), whose most relevant propositions – among them the continuity with Italian tradition and history, the insertion of Italian rationalism into the European debate, the use of new construction materials – will be developed in the following projects by the group; these projects are accomplished taking part to wide-appeal exhibitions, to give both the group and the principles of rationalist architecture the largest visibility. On the first public event, the 3rd Exhibition of Decorative Arts in Monza (1927), the architects present industrial plant projects, studying the application of serial construction elements; one year after, they engage in the design of “Italian economical houses” for the first Exhibition of Italian Rational Architecture (1928). This exhibition, organized by the initiative of A. Libera, who recently joined the group, is fundamental because the architects take the critical and political debate about rationalism onto national level. Group 7 realizes that the housing design theme, initially born as design prompt following the visit by some members of the group to the Weissenhof in Stuttgart, is the one who allows them to insert efficaciously into the action of reforming the Italian city and society. They were a group of valorous architects, well established both in terms of private bourgeois-class assignments and of political assignments, that now tried to reach the highest level of public assignments, a political ground that in Rome and from Rome intended to drive stimulating projects of renewal of the capital and of the Italian cities. In the next years the experiments on the housing subject will have fundamental consequences for the group and for each of its members. Among these the participation to competitions such as: Economical Furniture competition of 1928, that allows them to practice the housing interiors; the urban planning of Bolzano (1929), focusing on residential areas, but also on industrial and services areas; the first completed works, that for a fortunate coincidence of intentions regard exactly the housing subject, such as the residential building Novocomum (1927-29) by Terragni; and a pavilion for the 4th Exhibition in Monza, built as to be a real modern house, the Casa Elettrica (1930), elaborated by four members of Group 7. These two works are immediately included in the theoretical discourse already set up by the group, because they help defining the distinctive identity of rationalism compared with the other European movements. Moreover, they trace the road to tread on to hit the target of modernization of the Italian architecture, purpose vigorously asserted by the architects. At the top of its notoriety, Group 7 finds convenient to dismember and merge again into a national movement, the M.I.A.R. (Movimento Italiano di Architettura Razionale), that organizes the second Exhibition of Rational Architecture (1931), but will soon be cooled off by a clear intention of return to order, led by Marcello Piacentini. The collective work for the affirmation of rational architecture, started by Group 7, at this point is extinguished for good. Thus, the last chapter of this study stretches beyond the official end of Group 7, to follow its protagonists in their reflections, projects and interventions for the modern city, at this time dominated by the social housing, prefabricated in materials and rational in concept. It is a subject that they, even though not in a systematic way, started to face collectively, when in group, by many viewpoints (materials, industrialization, interiors, furniture, relation with the nature) and that they developed in the following years during the World War II (1941), influenced by G. Pagano and his magazine Casabella. Lastly, they confronted with the same housing subject during the time of the post-war reconstruction, when, in 1949, was launched the large national plan of reconstruction and extension of the Italian cities, known as INA-Casa Program. The evidence of this trail is clear in the project elaborated by Terragni with Sartoris for the workers’ residential neighborhood in Rebbio (1938), published by Pagano in one of the three Casabella issues dedicated to the Casa Popolare (Social housing) in 1941. It becomes then an important accomplishment of the Italian rationalist architecture the Harrar neigh borhood in Milan, coordinated and in part directly designed by Figini and Pollini (1951-55); and the Unità di Abitazione Orizzontale within the Tuscolano urban intervention (1950-54), completed by the other great protagonist of Group 7, Adalberto Libera, based on rationalist principles that had prefigured the horizontal city – see the case of Pagano, Diotallevi, Marescotti for Milan. The thesis ends retracing the continuity of theory and design in these works of the masters of Italian rationalism, in which the conceptual vision of the architecture and of the rational city, learned and shared within the experience of Group 7, reached its highest acknowledgement in the maturity of its protagonists.