Architect Pier Luigi Nervi, who designed the Stadio Flaminio for the 1960 Olympic Games.
Location: Rome, Italy / Photographer: Mark Kauffman, 1960
Nervi working with his sons
[ All images via LIFE photo archives / ©LIFE ]
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An impromptu Friday post (I generally do not publish on Fridays)—a wonderful time capsule featuring legendary Italian engineer and architect Pier Luigi Nervi (1891–1979) and his sports palace, Stadio Flaminio, built for the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome. (He built a total of two sports palaces for the games.) I especially love the dynamic and regal photograph leading off the set. All images were shot by notable LIFE magazine photographer Mark Kauffman. (Follow the link to see more of his work.)
Pier Luigi Nervi, Italian engineer and architect, internationally renowned for his technical ingenuity and dramatic sense of design, especially as applied to large-span structures built of reinforced concrete. His important works include a prefabricated 309-foot-span arch for the Turin Exhibition (1949–50) and the first skyscraper in Italy, the Pirelli Building (1955) in Milan, a collaborative design.
[...]
Although Nervi’s primary concern was never aesthetic, many of his works, nonetheless, reached the realm of poetry. His buildings achieved remarkable expressive force, as in the geometry of the slabs in the Gatti wool factory (1953), in Rome, and the mezzanine of the Palace of Labour, in Turin. Through his use of interpenetrating planes, of folded and bent plates, and of warping surfaces, Nervi introduced a new three-dimensional vocabulary into architectural design. He reminded architects that “materials, statics, the technology of construction, economic efficiency and functional needs are the vocabulary of the architectural speech.”
Nervi’s contribution has been compared to that of another builder whose work revolutionized architecture—Joseph Paxton, who built the Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London. In both instances, highly rational and innovative structures resulted from a continuous process of devoted search and development, with an emphasis on modular construction, prefabrication, and extreme physical and visual lightness.
[Excerpt from article written by Argentine architect Eduardo F. Catalano (1917–2010):
Emeritus Professor of Architecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge.
Author of Structures of Warped Surfaces (1960).]>> Read more at Encyclopædia Britannica
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