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Abstract
At a moment when standardization dominated housing design discussions, Italians engaged in a different kind of experiment in housing production. Under the Ina-Casa plan (1949–63), Italian architects developed a slow approach to architecture. Like its contemporaries, the plan grew out of a desire to provide affordable homes for the working class in the postwar period. But the primary goal of the Ina-Casa plan was creating jobs. The brainchild of the Minister of Labor and Social Security, Amintore Fanfani, the Ina-Casa plan was designed to put thousands of unemployed Italians back to work in the wake of the social upheaval and physical devastation wrought by World War II. The success of the plan was measured in terms of workdays created as well as in numbers of homes. Consequently, traditional methods and materials of construction—often rejected for being labor intensive—were embraced under the Ina-Casa plan as an effective way to create more jobs.
Notes
Notes
1. Luigi Beretta Anguissola, I 14 anni del piano Ina-Casa (Rome: Staderini, 1963), 47.
2 On the history of the Ina-Casa plan, see ibid.; Paola di Biagi, ed., La Grande Ricostruzione: Il Piano Ina-Casa e l'Italia degli anni cinquanta (Rome: Donzelli Editore, 2001); and Stephanie Z. Pilat, Reconstructing Italy: The Ina-Casa Neighborhoods of the Postwar Era (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014).
3 On the design manuals, see Franco Nuti, Tre quartieri INA Casa in Toscana (Florence: Polistampa, 2004); di Biagi, La Grande Ricostruzione (note 2). For English translations of excerpts, see Pilat, Reconstructing Italy (note 2).
4 Key figures working for or with Ina-Casa administration included Arnaldo Foschini, Renato Bonelli, Carlo de Maria, Bruno Zevi, Ludovico Quaroni, Giuseppe Vaccaro, and Adriano Olivetti. On the development of the Ina-Casa plan, see Paolo Niccoloso, “Genealogie del piano Fanfani,” in di Biagi, La Grande Ricostruzione (note 2).
5 1. Suggerimenti, norme, e schemi per la elaborazione e presentazione dei progetti: Bandi dei concorsi (Rome: F. Damasso, 1949); an English translation can be found in Pilat, Reconstructing Italy (note 2), 250.
6 Pilat, Reconstructing Italy (note 2), 248.
7 2. Suggerimenti, esempi, e norme per la progettazione urbanistica: Progetti tipo (Rome: F. Damasso, 1950).
8 On La Falchera, see Sergio Pace, “Oltre Falchera: L'Ina-Casa a Torino e dintorni,” in di Biagi, La Grande Ricostruzione (note 2), 279–91.
9 Rationalist architects working in the Fascist period drew inspiration for their modernist designs from Mediterranean vernacular in part as a means to argue for the Italian origins of modernism. See, e.g., Giuseppe Pagano and Guarniero Daniel, Architettura rurale italiana, Quaderni della Triennale (Milan: U. Hoepli, 1936); and Michelangelo Sabatino, Pride in Modesty: Modernist Architecture and the Vernacular Tradition in Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011).
10 Pilat, Reconstructing Italy (note 2), 33.
11 Pace, “Oltre Falchera” (note 7), 284.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Stephanie Z. Pilat
Stephanie Z. Pilat teaches Design and Architectural History at the University of Oklahoma. Her research focuses on points of intersection between politics and architecture and has been supported by a Fulbright fellowship, a Rome Prize, an American Association of University Women fellowship and a Wolfsonian-Florida International University fellowship. Pilat's current research project examines the hundreds of summer camps and sporting complexes built by the Fascist regime in Italy. She is the author of Reconstructing Italy: The Ina-Casa Neighborhoods of the Postwar Era, which was awarded the Society for Italian Historical Studies' Helen and Howard R. Marraro Prize.