Brutalism in Italy, 20 architectures you should know

The complex, considered a masterpiece of Brutalist architecture at an international level and today in a state of decay, is composed of four main buildings oriented along an east-west axis and immersed in a park, which house the different functional areas: offices and management, a boarding school for students, the teachers' building and a school. The plan-volume layout is characterised by a rigorous modular scansion, emphasised by the exposed concrete structure with constant pitch. Particularly innovative is the choice made by the architect, in agreement with the Institute's educators, to abolish the traditional dormitories in favour of duplex accommodation.

Situated at an altitude of 330 m on Monte Grisa, the sanctuary is nicknamed the 'cheese' by the people of Trieste due to its triangular shape. The complex, from which there is a spectacular view of the city, is characterised by two overlapping churches and an imposing structure in exposed reinforced concrete.

"This building introduced into school construction - perhaps for the first time in Italy - the identification of architecture with the structure, in this case very complex in the vaulting system": this is how Castiglioni described his work, considered by Pevsner to be one of the best examples of Brutalist architecture and, according to the critics, not without references to the expressionism of Poelzig and Mendelsohn (from the dramatisation of forms to the design of the openings). The complex consists of two in-line volumes - one of which is arched in plan and façade - of three storeys above ground, arranged on a block marked by a sequence of curvilinear prefabricated reinforced concrete sheds containing the common functions. The façade is punctuated by shaped partitions and iron-window panes that curve plastically towards the top.

The church fits into its context by openly detaching itself from the surrounding residential buildings, thanks to its marked upward movement. The front, doubled in the image reflected by the pool in front of it, is formed by a single elongated concrete triangle pierced by coloured windows, and is reminiscent on one side of Gothic spires and on the other suggests the idea of a tent pitched in the neighbourhood. The structure consists of reinforced concrete walls with steel beams supporting a porcelain aluminium sheet roof. Next to the church there are the parish buildings and clergy residences, distributed in a semicircle around a garden.

Reducing the so-called Casa Albero to a simple summer residence would be reductive, because the work designed by a family of architects (father, mother and son) for themselves is not just a beach house but an example of experimentation with a new architectural language in the field of housing. The work was conceived “in progress” in order to be continuously transformed, while maintaining a constant dialogue with nature. The complex consists of three buildings of different types: the house, with a repeatable modular structure made of raw concrete, glass and red steel; the ball, a 5-metre diameter sphere conceived as an external appendage to the house; the three cubes, cubic spatial modules interspersed with semi-modules containing the services, bedroom, living room and kitchen, in less than 40 square metres.

The building overlooking a hill in the Monte Mario urban park is characterised by an exposed concrete structural grid composed of C-shaped pillars and beams defining the general layout and the proportional ratio of elevations. Opaque envelope portions establish a dialogue with the glazing on the main façades. The work was a backdrop for some scenes of Elio Petri's film "Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto".

Located in the area north of the railway that since the war has become the site of expansion of industrial and commercial activities of the city, the multipurpose complex was created to accommodate, in addition to services and commercial activities, mini-apartments for workers of the Livestock Market. The monolithic building, characterized by a marked horizontality accentuated by the alternation of reinforced concrete floors with those of dark brick plaster, soon became a "black hole" of degradation and crime. Starting from the beginning of 2000, the complex has been the object of a regeneration intervention aimed not only to heal the physical degradation but also to face the deep-rooted social conflicts of the area: the project has provided for the dimensional revision of the lodgings to guarantee a better usability, the settlement of cultural and educational associations, the requalification of the external public spaces.

The building is characterised by a volume with a strong monumental impact, symbolising the institutional character of the construction The front is made entirely of concrete and is animated on the various levels in a dramatic play of light and shadow, through the tight rhythm of the exposed structure of concrete pillars and beams: expanded on the first two levels, where cyclopean pillars mark out the portico; tight on the next two floors; marked by projections and recesses on the upper levels.

The house for a Piedmontese cement entrepreneur is a passionate homage to concrete, cast in wooden formwork in beams and slabs and used in Vibramac cement blocks in the shells. The stepped progression of the volume, supported in the central part by a circular reinforced concrete structure enclosing an iron spiral staircase, creates a playful contrast between the gravity of the masses and their casual detachment from the ground. The brightly coloured windows and doorframes cast lively brushstrokes on the rough, grey elevations.

The building reconciles the designer's Anglo-Saxon brutalism with the historical context of Michelangelo's Porta Pia: the complex is characterised by reinforced concrete volumes clad with travertine panels that seek a dialogue with the colour scheme of the Aurelian walls and alternate with glass surfaces with dark bronze aluminium frames.

The building stands out with its provocative and disruptive character in the Nomentano neighbourhood, contrasting with the composed uniformity of the surrounding twentieth-century villas and buildings. The building, characterised by a sequence of overlapping and projecting volumes, evokes the image of a tree spreading its branches into the sky. On the outside, the structure reveals the internal functional division: the cubic basement with two underground levels, visible from the street, with the auditorium and library, the garage, the archives and the printing shop; the ground floor with the entrance hall and the large hall, recognisable by the full-height glazing on two floors; the first floor with the meeting room, cantilevered from the entrance; the two upper floors, housing offices, marked by a continuous metal strip that emphasises the change of function.

The building is a manifesto of the purest Brutalism, recognizable in the virtuosic and plastic use of concrete, in the rough surfaces marked by the wooden formwork and in the dramatic and vibrant articulation of the structural masses, in a tight dialectic between light and dark. Now overwhelmingly transfigured in spirit, the memory of the original architecture remains and, with it, the nostalgia for a design vision that knew how to look to the essence without betraying architectural quality and refinement.

The multifunction complex originally named Residence Porta Nuova is a representative sign of the architectural activity of the 1970s in Milan and strongly established in the city's historical memory. The reinforced concrete structure is marked by a pronounced horizontal scanning where precast concrete stringcourses delimit continuous steel and glass curtain walls. Park associati studio recently carried out a retrofitting project that interpreted the original language with philological correctness, without sacrificing meticulous attention to contemporary detail. Gioiaotto was the first LEED Platinum-certified building in Milan.

The Regional government congress center, formerly Federagrario e centro incontri CRT, was an imposing 8-storey building intended for offices and congress hall, composed of two symmetrical blocks with a tripartite front: a transparent basement slightly set back from the façade, a vertical development of the front designed by the contrast between the concrete stringcourses and the ribbon windows, and a glazed, set-back top. The conspicuous reinforced concrete structure with gigantic beams supported by cylindrical pillars is reminiscent of some of Kenzo Tange's renowned megastructures. In 2021 it was sold to a group of private investors and today it has been demolished to leave stage to a new building.

The district, commissioned by the Terni Acciaierie company to replace the previous workers' village in order to increase the density of housing in the area, and only partially realized, is composed of four three-storey concrete buildings, with articulated stepped volumes housing 240 apartments, common terraces and roof gardens. The intervention has been the subject of a historically relevant participatory design process that involved designers, developers and residents, called to express their voice, including the need for public and private green spaces, places for social life and separation between vehicle and pedestrian flows. 

The "red dinosaur", so defined for the cyclopean structure, the unusual shape and the color of the facades, is a residential complex in the Gallaratese district conceived as a utopian micro-city idialoguing with Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation in Marseilles. The work includes five buildings of different heights grouped around central common spaces of aggregation (an amphitheater and two smaller squares) and numerous pedestrian paths that highlight the search for a dialectical relationship between living space and public space.

Corviale is the neighborhood-symbol of the degradation of the capital's suburbs. The complex, extending its cyclopic dimensions to a territorial scale (it is called "il Serpentone", “The Snake”), hosts about 4500 inhabitants and is composed of three buildings: the monumental main slab – a single 986-meter-long body on nine floors – a second lower volume, parallel to the first, and a third body rotated 45°. Franco Purini said that "Fiorentino had a conception of living as a heroic movement and that he wanted his mammoth housing machine to be a kind of community that would regulate itself by making collective interests prevail over individual ones". Unfortunately, this idealistic vision has not been supported by the facts but Corviale – despite all social problems still existing – is still a place of life and an interesting case study not only in architectural but also socio-economical terms.

With its cyclopean dimensions, the complex in Rozzol Melara strongly characterises the urban landscape of the city. Conceived as a semi-independent settlement system equipped with all basic services and infrastructures, rather than as a simple residential building, the project consists of two L-shaped bodies, one twice as tall as the other, grouped around a central courtyard and connected by a system of covered walkways and collective services. The building, made entirely of exposed reinforced concrete, appears compact and unified by a certain monumentality, emphasised by the rhythm of the macroscopic pillars with a 15-metre pitch that define overscaled arcades.

The Basilica and Sanctuary of Madonna delle Lacrime (the Virgin of Tears), considered to be the largest pilgrimage church in Sicily, is the result of a design competition launched in 1957, intending to represent the importance for devotees of a miraculous event that happened four years before. The sculptural complex with a circular layout is divided into two levels – the basilica at the top and the crypt below – and is crowned by a conical concrete roof, 103 m high, surmounted by a bronze statue of the Virgin Mary.

The complex is characterised by a salmon-pink concrete body in the shape of a truncated, inverted pyramid with a rectangular base, housing the municipal offices, placed on top of a glazed volume that includes exhibition rooms and a theatre.