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The volume deals with the Olivetti colonia (summer camp building) at Brusson, in the Valle d’Aosta, built to a project by the architects Leonardo Fiori and Claudio Conte. An emblematic example of Adriano Olivetti's social policies, it is an outstanding case study for several reasons. The designers were selected by a competition, in 1956-1957, that attracted over thirty professionals, including Carlo Scarpa, Marcello D’Olivo and Vico Magistretti. Hence the analysis of the competing projects offers an insight into Italian architecture, called on to deal with complex and innovative themes. On the one hand, the Alpine context required profound reflection on the relation between architecture and the natural environment; on the other, the most advanced educational theories involved redefining a typology – the colonia – that fascism had stamped with its own character for propaganda purposes. For the colonia at Bruson, an original prefabrication system was also developed that was repeated and updated in numerous buildings in the following years.

Pietro Lingeri è una delle personalità più significative e autorevoli del razionalismo italiano che, insieme a Giuseppe Terragni, ha guidato la ricostruzione di Milano nel secondo dopoguerra. La sua opera è analizzata nel libro con scritti di architetti, storici e critici dell’architettura che promuovono una lettura rigorosa, stratificata e innovativa del suo lavoro, restituendo il contesto storico in cui era attivo, la sua poetica e ricerca, le collaborazioni artistiche e architettoniche così come l’influenza sul disegno urbano.
Il volume è articolato secondo una scansione tematica che analizza molteplici aspetti della progettualità di Lingeri, come la capacità di accogliere e reinterpretare stimoli diversi, giungendo a risultati personali e in anticipo sui tempi, nonché l’attenzione e la curiosità verso l’universo dell’arredamento.
Ampio spazio è poi dedicato alla produzione relativa al secondo dopoguerra, sottolineando l’idea di una continuità metodologica rispetto alla lezione del Movimento Moderno, nonché la ricorrenza della dimensione del cantiere e del ponteggio che hanno rappresentato per lui un modus operandi costante.

In the many accounts written to date about Pier Luigi Nervi, one of the 20th century’s most famous engineers and architects, Africa has remained a completely unexplored context. Yet between 1964 and 1980, Studio Nervi developed an extensive network of contacts on the continent. There were some completed buildings, but also many projects that, although remaining on paper, reveal a surprising mosaic of relations in South Africa, Ivory Coast, Libya, Congo, Nigeria, the Central African Republic, Tanzania and Algeria.
The vicissitudes of the African works shed light on the troubled transition from Studio Nervi’s epic phase – by this time drawing to its natural conclusion – to the managerial and expressive independence of his sons, against the backdrop of far-reaching changes in professional practice.
As Ana Tostões writes in the introduction, “today we are aware that we must include Africa among the geographies of our efforts to achieve a global understanding of the ‘modern diaspora’.”

Gottfried Semper (1803–1879) left behind a voluminous legacy of architectural-theory writings. The manner, in his works, in which he analysed architecture from a cultural-historical perspective as the key discipline in human artistry continues to exert a deep fascination up until today. The London Writings make available previously unpublished or little-known texts originating during Semper’s exile in London (1850–1855) in a critical and commented edition, including in their original wordings. Swayed by his impressions of the first Great Exhibition of 1851 and as a lecturer at the Department of Practical Art, it was in London that Semper laid the foundations for his theoretical magnum opus Der Stil (Style, 1860/63). He counterpoised the phenomena of the globalised flow of merchandise and a globalisation of knowledge that he observed with his thoughts on the global development of architectural culture in all its manifold material, social and political conditions.

The edition is the outcome of a joint SNSF research project between the Institute for History and Theory of Art and Architecture (ISA) at the Università della Svizzera italiana and the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta) at ETH Zurich.

• Open Access

One hundred and one years since his birth, the Milanese architect and designer Vico Magistretti (1920-2006) is being celebrated in the Palazzo dell’Arte in Milan, where he took the first steps in a long and fruitful career, with a monographic exhibition that seeks to create a dialogue between the different areas of his whole œuvre. The exhibition, organized with the collaboration of the Fondazione studio museo Vico Magistretti, and the book, have as their object the precious heritage of drawings, sketches, models, photographs, videos, prototypes and original pieces preserved in the Magistretti Archive, together with materials from the archives of companies, institutions and individuals.

Divided into thematic sections, Vico Magistretti’s work is presented for the first time in a unified and interrelated way, to render the breadth of his activity and so offer an up-to-date and extended critical interpretation beyond the celebration of his most famous icons: from the design of exhibitions to urban design, from furniture to product design, from prefabrication to interior architecture, from middle-class clients to “homes for all”, from traditional to industrial materials, from geometric rigor to figurative expressionism.

The narrative around the figure of Vico is completed by a cycle of testimonies and tributes that confirm his innovative character and the great influence he exerted on the younger generations of designers.

An analysis of the phenomenon of the copy and artistic reproducibility is a topic of growing interest in the context of the most recent historical studies aimed at recovering those values ​​and meanings long denied by critics in the twentieth century. This volume presents the role of copying in the figurative arts of the early modern age through the textual sources, from artistic historiography to technical treatises, between early Humanism and Enlightenment. The survey proposed seeks to read copies and reproductions by comparing their reflections in the specific field of artistic literature with those offered by the other humanities, from ancient and modern literature to the theory of architecture, and at the same time intends to recontextualise and present critical and material reflections on the copy between Italy, Spain and the rest of Europe, while investigating sources and case studies, some of which are little known to date.

The authors draw on written and graphic sources as well as excavations and the surviving structures to reconstruct the history of the phases of construction, decorations and furnishings of the churches of Rome from the 11th to the early 15th century. The fourth volume in the series, it investigates thirty-seven places of worship, including numerous famous Marian churches such as S. Maria Rotonda (the Pantheon) or S. Maria sopra Minerva, as well as some that are less well known, such as S. Maria in Cappella. Each monographic chapter focuses on the history of the institutions of each church, its architecture and its liturgical furnishings. S. Maria in Cosmedin occupies a pre-eminent position: the analysis of the complex phases of its construction and restoration in many cases shed new light on the edifice, even though it is generally held to be well known. The volume is enriched with a set of colour plates as significant testimony to ecclesiastical architecture in Rome in the Middle Ages.

• Deutsche original version (PDF 815.75 KB)

Gottfried Semper (1803-1879) was an important figure in European intellectual life. Born in Hamburg in 1803, he trained in Göttingen, Paris, Rome and Athens. After making his debut in Dresden, he continued his professional career brilliantly in Zurich and Vienna. A sturdy republican, he fought on the barricades in 1849. Subsequently he was forced into exile in Paris and above all London. The Dresden Opera House (the Semperoper), the Zurich Polytechnic and the Kaiserforum on the Ringstrasse in Vienna are some of the most representative architectural achievements.

The purpose of this book is to trace for the first time a complete picture of Semper's personality, providing a true biography on the basis of an accurate reading of his personal correspondence kept in the ETH gta archive in Zurich. Semper's design and theoretical work is therefore analysed in the light of his existential development and the cultural history of the 19th century.

In the Roman world, various traditions of iconic life were present in the period before the icon was affirmed. By examining these, the articles in this issue restore part of the context in which the concept of the icon was born. And they invite readers to add a new perspective on the phenomenon: that of a surrogate for the living iconic body.

Il carteggio d'artista brings together thirty-one essays devoted to artist’s letters in the modern age. From a transnational perspective, European scholars and research groups explore the potential offered by the correspondence of painters, sculptors and architects, which the historiography of the nineteenth and nineteenth centuries has identified as a source in art history. The essays investigate their typologies and historiographical and literary models, favouring a reading that seeks to analyse the dynamics and phenomena of irradiation produced by the long and medium-term sojourns of artists in Rome.

From Bellori to Francesco Albani, Algarotti, Bottari, Goethe, Winckelmann, Flaxman, Johann Martin Wagner and Giovanni Costa, the essays adopt different time frames and geographical perspectives to explore the potential of a source whose autonomy was recognised in 1821 by Leopoldo Cicognara’s Catalogo ragionato dei libri d’arte. The experience of the landscape traversed and sociability, the practices of training young students inside and outside the academies, as well as the horizontal exchanges between artist and artist and correspondence between artist and client: in this collection of studies, the routes of letters from Rome or to Rome depict the epistolary network that between the Age of Enlightenment and the second Restoration proved decisive in the circulation of models, works and artists well beyond the borders of the Papal States.