Antinomies of Realism in Postwar Italian Architecture

Realism was an aesthetic tendency in Italian literature, figurative arts and architecture during the postwar years. In architecture the turn to realism was galvanized by the immediate political and social circumstances of postwar Italy and influenced by parallel events in film, philosophy and literature. By the late 1950s the definition of realism had transvalued to reflect the changed conditions of reality: economic growth, urban expansion, developments in Italian Communist-Marxism and critical thinking that gave architects new means to interpret the relation between architecture and reality. Questions about reality, representation and realism were fundamental to the reformulation of modernism during this period. Realism was considered a critical stance from which modernist imperatives, such as its conflation of reformist ideology with the standardization of architectural form, could be interrogated. The present study casts doubt on both the monolithic category of modernism and the historical concept of realism. It prepares the ground for a more complex articulation of modernism and anticipates the theoretical impetus that motivated architectural theory after 1968. This dissertation examines six intersections between realism and Italian architecture from the early 1950s to the mid-1970s. Between the "realist techniques" employed at the Tiburtino Housing District and the hybridized modernism of Aldo Rossi's Monte Amiata Gallaratese Housing, an architectural problematic of historical and theoretical consequence is defined. These two projects anchor very different interpretations of realism and modernism. They set the polar coordinates between which architectural discourse traveled as architects attempted to confront the theoretical and formal dilemmas posed by the phrase the representation of reality . Each chapter of this study presents an episode in architectural realism as it was comprised by a broader constellation of cultural forces that were influential but not determinant of the reality under inspection. The study draws upon new archival evidence, on cultural and social conditions to argue for an interpretation of realism that tracks the shift from a culture of reconstruction to the advent of a mass consumer society. The thesis asks the reader to entertain definitions of reality that support resolutely incompatible architectural forms, politics and theoretical interpretations of realism.