Paolo Desideri | Pier Luigi Nervi: Creativity vs Extravagance | NORR ed 2021

I am always very surprised to see around the world, how much the Italian business card still counts for an architect. Despite all the Italian architecture, much more in the world than in the reality of our homeland, it still appears to be endowed with great prestige.
In general, I believe that Italian architecture and design has always been recognizable in the world for its ability to tie together form and construction, morphology and technique, design and production process. In other words, architecture and engineering. A very ancient tradition starting from Roman architecture which was none other than its engineering. The arch, for example, well represents one of the synthesis points between architecture and engineering. Structural problems are solved not by technology, but by form. The creativity of architecture is all spent on solving problems.
It seems to me that Italian engineering has always been characterized by this primacy of morphology over technology, and therefore has always been closely linked to architecture understood as a discipline of creativity of useful forms. Things stand thanks to the ability of the form to organize the system. The opposite of the Anglo-Saxon engineering tradition that is redundant with technology, steel, blast furnaces in front of which architecture often only has the role of showing the redundant musculature of the blast furnace industry. A tradition that in Italy binds architecture and engineering to each other not only in the season of Roman architecture but continues to the present day: the creativity of Pierluigi Nervi is the best representation of this glorious tradition.
Speaker Bio:
Paolo Desideri
Professor at Universitá Roma Tre
Partner of ABDR
Paolo Desideri (Rome 1953) is the co-founder of ABDR Architetti Associati. He has been their managing director and technical chief up to March 2019. Paolo graduated in architecture in Rome in 1980 and in the same year, he has been the visiting scholar at the Institute for Architecture in New York (USA). He has been a Full Professor since 1985 and since 2000, the Full Professor of Architectural Design at the School of Architecture of the University of Rome “Roma Tre”, where he is Coordinator of the Doctorate in Landscapes
of the Contemporary City.
He has been a Visiting Professor in many Schools of Architecture, among them the Washington University (Seattle, USA), the Bauhaus (Dessau, Germany); the Faculty of Architecture of Rome “La Sapienza”, the Bildende Kunst Akademie (Wien, Austria); the Waterloo University (Toronto, Canada), the University of Novisad (Novisad, Serbia). From 1998 to 2002 he has been the Coordinator for the Analysis Unit of the Department for Development and Cohesion Policies of the Italian Ministry of Treasury, Budget and Economic Planning. He was also the Co-director of “Gomorra. Lands and Cultures of the Contemporary City” from 1998 to 2002. Since 2016, Paolo has been a member of the Scientific Committee of Industria Italiana delle Costruzioni. Paolo’s design activity is mainly carried out in the public and private sectors of large infrastructural works, museum and cultural public buildings and large real estate complexes. Paolo has progressively specialized in integrated design and in the control of the relationships between Architecture and Engineering with particular attention to infrastructure works projects, in particular railway and underground stations.
He is author of numerous critical and theoretical texts of architectural and urban design, among them: Pier Luigi Nervi, published by Zanichelli; Città di latta, published by Meltemi; Ex-city, published by Meltemi; International Style?, published by Meltemi; La città senza luoghi, published by Costa&Nolan; Attraversamenti: i nuovi territori dello spazio pubblico, published by Costa&Nolan.
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