Enhancing the Historic Public Social Housing through a User-Centered Design-Driven Approach

The study presents a didactic experience for the deep refurbishment and the revitalization of the San Siro neighborhood in Milan (Italy). The public housing is a significative example of the 20th-century architecture (also named “Italian Modernism of Architecture”), designed by the Italian architects—Franco Albini, Renato Camus, Giancarlo Palanti, and Laslo Kovacs (1938–1941). Nowadays, it is a multicultural area, characterized by the presence of a fragile population, with strong socio-spatial inequalities, intercultural and intergenerational conflicts. Here, an architectural design project is realized, experimenting with innovative and up-to-date design solutions. This experience develops a sensitive awareness of the multidimensional complexity of the environmentally responsible design, which requires a critical balance among different disciplines and skills. The reusing of existing buildings has sustainable importance for preventing new land-uses and for saving the potential energy consumption related to the construction process. Only a widespread knowledge of the local socio-economic conditions through participatory actions permits the selection of appropriate retrofit solutions, considering also the high cultural, social, and economic values. Functional and social mix, space flexibility, green design, renewable energies, circular economy criteria, and continuative maintenance are the correct strategies for boosting the social revitalization and for improving fairness, safety, architectural quality, human comfort, energy efficiency, and sustainability in this public housing neighborhood.

Material Legacies: Italian modernism and the postwar history of case del fascio

In recent decades, architectural historians, preservationists, and the general public have shown a growing interest in Fascist-era buildings. Many of the most high-profile examples are those associated with the monumental excesses of the regime. However, new attention has also been focused on more modest buildings that are significant examples of interwar Italian modernism or Rationalism, including former party headquarters (case del fascio). Taking as primary examples works by Giuseppe Terragni, the architect most often associated with Rationalism, as well by Luigi Carlo Danieri and Luigi Vietti, whose interwar contributions to Italian modernism have been less often the focus of scholarly attention, this article traces the postwar histories of case del fascio with the aim of better understanding the ways in which architecture and politics intersect and some of the consequences of this for the contemporary Italian architectural landscape.

Malipiero, Gian-Francesco (1882–1973)

Gian-Francesco Malipiero was an Italian composer whose life spanned an expansive period of Italian history, from the post-Risorgimento years through two disastrous wars and into the turbulent anni di piombo. Remembered as a Venetian tied to his beloved Asolo in the hills of the Veneto, Malipiero in fact spent his formative years in a variety of locations. His cosmopolitan upbringing took him to Trieste, Vienna, Paris, Berlin, and Bologna, where he absorbed a diversity of influences and studied with an array of tutors. Two principal musical spheres influenced his early life: Parisian modernism (he attended the riotous premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring in 1913) and the secondaprattica of Claudio Monteverdi, whose renaissance works he studied and later edited in their entirety—antique music would form a thread of meaning that wove through much of his later work. Into the 1920s, Malipiero spent frequent amounts of time in Rome and was (with Casella and the poet Gabriele d’Annunzio) a founding member of the avant-garde group the CorporazionedelleNuoveMusiche. This was the era in which Italian modernism and Italian Fascism formed an uneasy partnership, and this group played its role in the bombastic nationalism of the 1920s. Yet, despite a burgeoning friendship with Mussolini, Malipiero’s career was almost derailed in 1932 when the fascist "Manifesto of Italian Musicians for the tradition of Nineteenth-Century Romantic Art" criticised his music heavily, and in 1934 his opera Il FigliodellaCambiata was banned by the authorities due to its subversive libretto by Pirandello. From the war years onwards, Malipiero retreated from public life and spent longer periods in Asolo, with his influence on Italian musical life felt most keenly in his tutelage of a young Luigi Nono and Bruno Maderna.

Life as Art, Art as Life, and Life’s Art: the ‘Living Poetics’ of Italian Modernism

This article studies the key concept of ‘life’ within the context of Italian modernism, understood in the broad sense of a network of cultural responses in the period from 1861 until the mid-1930s. Following Roberto Esposito’s suggestion that the transversal category of life is distinctive for Italian “living thought” (Esposito), the ‘living poetics’ here exposed focuses on three key literary moments in which the crucial relationship between life and art is radically redefined. D’Annunzio’s ‘life as art’ aesthetics develops a ‘lifestyle’ with an individualist as well as nationalist dimension with its climax in the First World War. Futurism, starting from the axiom that war is the sole hygiene of the world, develops instead an ‘art as life program’ with which to revolutionize not only present life but also the afterlife. Finally, the young realists of the 1930s bring back absolutist notions of life to their realist and private proportions in order to create a poetics of reconstruction after the trauma of the Great War. A comparison between these literary moments shows how the concept of life not only is a constitutive element of an Italian ‘living poetics,’ but also that literary change entails a constant redefinition of autonomist and heteronomous aspects of the paradoxical tension between art and life.