The Aesthetics of reinforced concrete: notes about a controversial issue

The aesthetics of reinforced concrete: notes about a controversial issue

Cettina Lenza (ICOMOS Italia)

The beginning of the 20th century is a crucial moment in the history of reinforced concrete, marking its transition from construction technology to architectural language. This new technique is applied to objects other than infrastructure and industrial buildings, such as residential and religious buildings.
Historiography identifies Perret's apartment building on Rue Franklin in Paris (1903) as the breakthrough work. Le Corbusier started to exploit the potential of reinforced concrete with the Dom-ino system (1914) developed with Du Bois, that laid down the premises for his "five points". The sculptural possibilities offered by the new technique were firstly explored in the inter-war period in expressionist architecture.
In Italy, the reception of reinforced concrete is controversial. The Gruppo 7, formed in 1926, considers the experimentation of reinforced concrete to inaugurate "a new archaic epoch". A thesis taken up by Salvatore Vitale in his book L'estetica dell'architettura. Saggio sullo sviluppo dello spirito costruttivo, opening to the possibilities offered by reinforced concrete but also underlining the risk that new materials, thanks to the possibility of simplifying construction challenges, may end up weakening creativity, instead of stimulating it. This fear was overcome by Nervi, who defined reinforced concrete as "the most beautiful construction system that mankind has been able to find up to now". In the book Science or Art of Building? (1945) he hypothesised a grammar able to free new materials from traditional building practices and to contribute to the affirmation of a new style, conceived a style of "truth" (1955). During the 1950s, Le Corbusier's last works in beton brut inspired the current of Brutalism, which in the rough use of concrete goes beyond the imperative of constructive sincerity of the Modern Movement to become a real style.