by MARIO ALBERTO CHIORINO
Pier Luigi Nervi (1891-1979) is one of the greatest structural architects of the 20th Century. His extraordinary success in combining the art and the science of building produced some of contemporary architecture’s finest works. Together with other engineers who had a natural inclination to synthesise static and spatial ideas (above all, Eduardo Torroja), Nervi contributed, in the middle decades of the last century, to a break with the formal concepts of rationalism. His constructions based, like those of Torroja, on bold technical-structural solutions achieved an extraordinary elegance and have become icons of a new kind of architecture which enjoy world-wide admiration and esteem. His creations, scattered across Italy, Europe, America and Australia, made those years a glorious period for Italian architecture.
A native of the Valtellina, Nervi graduated in Civil Engineering at Bologna in 1913, in a fertile period for scientific, technical and architectural ideas. In the years straddling the 19th and 20th centuries, the new technique of reinforced concrete began to take its place alongside the technology of steel which had characterised the engineering and architecture of the great constructions of the 19th century. This led to a renewal of construction methods and of the very concept of project design in the years to come. Thanks to the contribution of a few pioneers, builders, designers and scholars, the new technique quickly became popular in a very wide variety of sectors and, from the very beginning, it was associated with a more or less conscious search for stylistic results. Just consider Hennebique’s daring structures for the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais (for which he won the Grand Prix at the 1900 Paris Exhibition) and the bold and elegant Ponte del Risorgimento which he built in Rome in 1911; or the bridges Maillart constructed in Switzerland in the first years of the century paying particular attention to the expressive value of the structures.