Brutalist Italy captures the emancipation of concrete in Italian architecture

When thinking of Italian architecture, the mind wanders to structures boasting Renaissance excesses and Baroque influences. Italy, however, is shaped by a diversity of styles, with its built environment often marked by balanced proportions, elaborate facades and a measured use of columns, arches and vaults, impressively laced in classical motifs. There is, however, another image of Italy, often found in bourgeois suburbs and underused historic city centres. Towering edifices of exposed concrete lying unattended as lone sentinels of vast urban landscapes, exemplifying Brutalist bel paese – the image of Italian brutalism juxtaposed with the ornate 'bel paese’ (beautiful country). In that, architectures, ranging from private residences, social housing complexes, churches, courts, schools and railway terminals, categorically defy the binary categorisations of ‘charming’ and ‘ugly’, ‘rational’ and ‘nonsensical’, that often plague typological discourse.

A photographic book by Italian architectural photographers Stefano Perego and Roberto Conte depicts, as stated by the duo in the afterword, “A vision of Italy distinct from that found on postcards.” Brutalist Italy: Concrete Architecture from the Alps to the Mediterranean Sea, published by FUEL, documents more than 100 buildings, constructed between the 1960s and the 1980s. Perego and Conte journeyed 20,000km over five years, crossing all the regions of the peninsula to record glimpses of "an alternate seldom considered city". From the Sanctuary of Monte Grisa in Trieste to the “Washing Machines” in Genoa, the Casa del Portuale in Naples to the Jesi cemetery in central Italy, the featured buildings in the book posit complex solutions that, as per the photographers, were “built and tested – with courage, perhaps with madness, often in the pursuit of utopia”.

The book is categorised geographically into four sections – North West, North East, Central, South and Islands. “We selected the buildings not only according to their relevance but also their type, as we wanted to give an idea of how widespread the use of exposed reinforced concrete was in those years and for a multitude of uses,” the photographers tell STIR.

Adrian Forty, professor emeritus of architectural history at the Bartlett School of Architecture – University College of London, in his introduction to the book, outlines how concrete, compared to its disposition in Northern Europe as a seemingly pure material, “that when properly used, does no more than speak the simple truth of the structure”, in Italy, revealed contrary applications “that were semantically more complex”. A material rather exploited in the Italian landscape, as Forty notes, concrete was often placed alongside noble materials such as natural stone. An example is Figni and Pollini’s church of the Madonna dei Poveri in Milan, in which the clerestory screen wall features alternating courses of stone and concrete blocks – a combination that otherwise would’ve been outrightly rejected if it were carried through outside of Italy. Forty’s note also discusses how the era of concrete architecture lasted longer in Italy than it did elsewhere, attributing the survival to “the greater willingness [of Italian architects] to grasp the ambiguities of concrete, and to recognise its pluralities”. 

“In Italy especially, as the remarkable collection of buildings photographed for this book shows, concrete was the medium through which, above all others, architects saw themselves best able to show what it meant to be an architect,” he observes.

Brutalist Italy is an ode to the unattended glorious world in concrete that the Milan-based photographers grew up admiring – “architectures located in the provincial parts of Italy that are not considered outside their towns”, as the duo tells STIR. “Italy”, they continue, “was an important destination already in the Grand Tour of the 18th century and its architecture was painted and photographed thousands of times. We liked the idea of proposing another kind of tour in a different Italy, distant from stereotypes and yet to be re-discovered (also by Italians!).”

An eerie silence engulfs the subjects, coming across as castaways frozen in time, showing another side of a country, a sombre one, perhaps. Beyond its pervading romance and joie de vivre.

'Brutalist Italy: Concrete Architecture from the Alps to the Mediterranean Sea' is published by FUEL and can be purchased here.