Lignano Pineta s.p.a. was founded in 1952 to develop properties on the strip of land that lies south of Latisana, between the Friulian lagoons and the Adriatic Sea: from an original idea of creating campsites, it had developed to a vacation village, then a competition had come, won by Marcello d’Olivo, an architect with a peculiar trait, Venetian-trained and close to the research of organic architecture, who, with the typical timing of artistic creation born of intuition and elaboration – as historian Diana Barillari has written – within a very short time from the deadline had proposed a shape destined to become the icon of a town, as well as of an entire way of conceiving vacations, tourism and their relationship with landscape: a spiral. 

A spiral, growing incrementally in width, is in fact the figure through which D'Olivo translated into physical reality the principle of attention to the territory that underlies the entire project: by renouncing the conventional scheme of streets perpendicular to the coastline, by renouncing a development in continuous sequences of lots, the pine forest and the existing landscape with all its specificities are integrated into the design and, finally, into the development itself, as also the planned architectural types are meant to demonstrate. An “slightly American” beach, Pasolini would call it, in which the spirit of landscape project had nonetheless been breathed. A few years after the beginning of the story, it was August 1954, Domus – which already two years earlier had presented D’Olivo’s projects putting them in continuity with those by Wright – published on issue 297 a selection of drawings and early photographs of Lignano Sabbiadoro in the act of growing as a pilot experiment of an urban planning closer perhaps to the concept of territory than to the concept itself of city.

There is a sandy peninsula, south of Latisana, at the mouth of the Tagliamento River: Lignano Pineta, where a vacation center will be built. A former hunting reserve with beautiful vegetation. Heather, broom, Austrian red pines, sea pine, reeds, on land completely untouched by buildings. An extension of nine kilometers by six of fine sandy dune beach. Eels, turbot, lagoon fishing, foxes, hares.

On the tip of the Lignano peninsula a seaside settlement was established about twenty years ago; the rest had remained completely untouched until a few months ago. A group of Venetians, of privates, thought of tracing in the virgin area one or two roads with an outlet to the sea, to subdivide and sell and create campsites.

Architect Marcello D’Olivo was called to guide them in their undertaking. There were a great number of site inspections; and there it became evident that, should roads perpendicular to the sea be opened and any building development be given way, these roads would automatically generate their own perpendiculars, and within such network would in a very short time disrupt the beauty of the place, consisting of its vegetation. D'Olivo, having settled on site in a wooden shack, studied the master plan of the place as well as of the whole peninsula in general. His basic concern was to introduce roads, houses, hotels, stores, without altering the feeling of the forest. And he solved this problem with a system of curved roads with different centers: the different landscapes, dunes, pines, glades, sea, beach, are therefore appearing before one’s eyes in a continuous and unexpected unfolding.

Having defined the plans, and the structural principles, it took the men, the craftsmen and wall builders, who would build, on site, in the way the place was requiring, and in a way that everything could cost very little. Then the team of Ermenegildo Ursella and his four sons, Friulians, bricklayers for generations, made their appearance: these men dived into the construction process with pioneer enthusiasm and industrial organization at the same time.

This organization of theirs is of a very special kind: a modern form of the medieval artisan community; the workers are trained within the community itself, through a school – their school in Buie – in which the boys begin at fourteen, then at eighteen they are carpenter masons, and master builders at twenty-five. And the school itself is a production site for work.

Having opened the roads in the green pine forest, it was a matter of starting to build and establishing a certain direction that would condition and guide the buildings and their development. Here, materials should have no cladding. Where possible, buildings should be detached from the ground to make way for underbrush vegetation. Dwellings, among the greenery, must be ventilated in all directions. These are the basic features of the buildings, the first of which to be built was along the “great street”. All the shops – the bars, cafes, restaurants, ice cream parlors – were combined into a single building that winds in successive bodies for six hundred meters along the two parallel arteries that spiral from the center towards the sea collecting all the other streets.

After the stores building, the construction of housing buildings in Lignano began: single and row holiday houses, and a camping center. On the following pages we illustrate some of these buildings, in the different stages of their construction or design.

The peninsula of Lignano is stunning. Its vegetation, colors, and sky make it a geographically indefinite piece of land: there are Canadian corners, bits of Scandinavia, sudden African landscapes, glades reminiscent of the Far East.