A new book on brutalist Italian architecture by the photographers Roberto Conte and Stefano Perego shines a light on Italy’s greatest (and most neglected) works in concrete building. Conte and Perego, whose previous monographs include Soviet Asia, spent five years assembling this portfolio of the country’s contribution to the brutalist architecture movement.
Brutalist Italy: Concrete architecture from the Alps to the Mediterranean Sea
A celebration of brutalist Italian architecture
Italian brutalism always had a rawer edge than its more rational, robust equivalents elsewhere. There’s something especially sculptural, almost wilfully ephemeral about projects like the spindly columns of Luigi Ciapparella’s cemetery extension in Busto Arsizio, 1971, or the museum dedicated to the sculptor Augusto Murer, designed by Giuseppe Davanzo in 1971, with its bright red roofs and extended steel frame.
Unfinished residential building, Bisaccia, by Aldo Loris Rossi, 1981, built in 1990
In part, this was a reaction against the stripped classical austerity of fascism, but it was also a response to the Catholic church’s shifting priorities and new ways of worship that saw the reshaping of traditional church architecture. There are plenty of churches (and cemeteries) within, but the only thing they share is a desire to be different.
Our Lady of Tears Sanctuary, Syracuse, by Michel Andrault, Pierre Parat, 1966–94
In his introduction, the architectural historian Adrian Forte quotes the architect Luigi Figini, writing of his church of Madonna dei Poveri in Milan, as saying that ‘the defects of this building are many and great; but in truth, I do not know how I could have avoided them’. In Italy, brutalism wasn’t some rational expression of ultimate truth, merely another means of architectural expression, one that didn’t always work out.
Villa Gontero, Cumiana, by Carlo Graffi , Sergio Musmeci, 1969–71
As well as the heroes of the era, there are also many ruins featured, whether unfinished or abandoned. Perhaps none are as spectacular and evocative as Giuseppe Perugini, Raynaldo Perugini, and Uga de Plaisant’s Tree House in Fregene, a graffitied, long-neglected husk that rivals Gillespie, Kidd & Coia’s St. Peter's Seminary in Cardross, Scotland, as one of the great romantic remnants of pure modernist invention.
Jesus the Redeemer Church, Turin, by Nicola Mosso, Leonardo Mosso, Livio Norzi, 1954–7
Brutalist Italy contains such a cavalcade of concrete riches that it seems selfish to publish any more images here; you’ll have to buy the book to see the best ones.
Saint Mary Immaculate Church, Longarone, by Giovanni Michelucci, 1966–82
Brutalist Italy: Concrete architecture from the Alps to the Mediterranean Sea, Roberto Conte and Stefano Perego, £26.95, FUEL Publishing
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