| During the middle decades of the twentieth century, modern architecture was significantly re-shaped as it expanded from a relatively small, local phenomenon centered in northern Europe to an international movement. Italy was among those places where modernism was most radically re-invented, reflecting the Italian experience of Fascism and the Second World War. The Cesate quarter, a large, working-class residential project on the northwest periphery of Milan, exemplifies this re-invention. Designed between 1950 and 1954 by a team of architects led by Franco Albini, Ignazio Gardella, and Ernesto Rogers, the quarter comprises approximately 500 single-family homes and a single, four-story apartment building with 98 units. The quarter was commissioned under a national plan to construct public housing that the newly-elected Christian Democrats initiated in 1949 in order to solidify the democratic ideals of the new country and to reinforce traditional Italian culture. Constrained in part by official policy, the architects of the Cesate quarter used elements of the abstract formal vocabulary of prewar modernism to craft a design that evoked the variegated landscapes of historic Italian settlements, with their winding streets and neighborhood piazzas. Because of the social aspirations of the architects, as well as their sensitivity to local conditions, both historical and environmental, the Cesate quarter and postwar Italian architecture in general have been characterized as Neorealist. First popularized to describe Italian cinema and literature in the years immediately following the war, this term was introduced into the architectural discourse in the mid-1950s. Despite the initial claims that Neorealist cinema and literature were the direct outgrowth of the revolutionary impulses of the reconstruction, recent scholarship has demonstrated that they were in fact deeply rooted in prewar practices. This dissertation shows that Neorealist architecture, too, was the culmination of lines of research initiated in the 1930s that gained new currency in the tumultuous political and cultural environment that followed the war. |
