Italy is fragile. The seismic sequence that has been devastating the country nonstop since 2009 has laid bare a cultural outlook. It shows behaviour oblivious to the events that have occurred over the past 50 years in the history of Italian earthquakes. Following the 3 recent earthquakes, the policies for dealing with catastrophes, preserving historical heritage, installing temporary housing and completing new reconstruction projects are uncoordinated, isolated and marginal episodes. Faced with more than 50,000 buildings to be rebuilt, needing an investment of over 20 billion euros of public money, Italian reconstruction is of the quantitative, not the qualitative type.
Chapter 1: L’Aquila 2009 – 2017
Reconstruction after earthquakes is one of the stumbling blocks in Italy today. In L’Aquila, the red zone (the inner city destroyed by the earthquake) still looks like a ghost town. The C.A.S.E. (prefabricated emergency housing) model understandably stirred controversy and failed to solve the real problems of designing adequate housing. It is still a negative symbol of the Abruzzo earthquake. Clearly the issues are far more complex. Quality works such as Renzo Piano’s Auditorium or Shigeru Ban’s Concert Hall are not enough. They are propitiatory architectural works dispersed over an area whose identity and specific character need to be urgently enhanced as the basis for reconstruction. In such situations it is essential to rediscover the lost traces and elements of spontaneous and anonymous architecture. We need to reclaim the signs capable of embodying the significance of the project by focusing on the peculiarities of the site. We also need to minimise the prevailing technical, self-referential visual languages that are alien to the context and connected with a cosmopolitan kind of architecture.
Chapter 2: Emilia 2012 – 2017
As in Irpinia in 1980, the evacuees in Emilia are still accommodated in modest rows of construction shacks. The work of Elemental or Toyo Ito is unknown here. The earthquake in Emilia is seen as mainly destroying factory buildings. There were “only” 27 deaths, most of them caused when isostatic structures collapsed because beams were simply supported on pillars without being securely fastened. The essential geography of the Po Valley is being altered by the dynamics of reconstruction, which is doing more damage than the earthquake itself. The typical cascine a corte farmhouses made famous in photographs by Luigi Ghirri and stories by Giovannino Guareschi are a piece of that endangered Italian landscape. Historically distinguished by their geometric purity and simple forms, they have been demolished and replaced by prefabricated houses made of wood lined with thermal insulation, PVC and plasterboard. Whether they were rebuilt as clumsy replicas or as simulacra of mountain cabins from Trentino hardly matters.
Chapter 3: Central Italy 2016 – 2017
The real risk is a loss of bearings. Everywhere the spate of new buildings will make these areas unrecognisable with destructive intrusions and the defilement of the landscape. For the hundreds of villages linked by footpaths and peasant farms making up this stretch of the Apennine ridge, the future is precarious. The assembly of temporary emergency modules in the form of tents and grey-panelled container homes is being repeated with the same methodical regularity we have seen before. The alternative proposed by Shigeru Ban to make rooms by installing paper partitions fixed to cardboard tubes in the sports hall at Camerino was a partial exercise that was not concretised in a solution that could be extended and diffused. Apart from Stefano Boeri’s already operational canteen at Amatrice, construction is proceeding slowly with lacklustre infill buildings. Even in these places, the traditional sandstone buildings will be replaced by technological wooden prefabs.
