3. The Happiness of an Architect

In 1948 at the age of fifty-seven, and with an established architectural career behind him, Michelucci resigned from the chair of the Florentine Architectural Faculty where he had been teaching for twenty years. In an open letter entitled "The Happiness of an Architect" (La Felicità dell’Architetto) expressed his uneasiness at the situation in the faculty.43 This is a largely overlooked treatise that provides a key to understanding Michelucci's work that followed. In this document Michelucci retraced the reasons for his resignation in his search for a different outlook on architecture: this demanded an enunciation of his own principles concerning the architect's craft, and how he saw his own role as an architect in society.

Was there a change in Michelucci's thinking though? In 1980, writing about "The Happiness of an Architect" Michelucci commented that the ideas he had expressed at the time had been a "constant"44 in his whole life and work, which suggests therefore there was no great "about face". If the basic principles were the same, then the character of his work after the war was certainly very different to that before it.

At what point then did the character of Michelucci's work change, and why? Well in effect the whole period from 1941 to 1948 constituted one of research in which he was engaged with issues of the "new city", and at the same time of nature. More than anything though, from 1941 onwards Michelucci's work reflected the position of an architect working after the outbreak of war: after the Fascist projects had ceased. Moreover, the change in character of Michelucci's work reflected a return to his native Tuscan environment and his involvement with projects of a very different nature.

The New City

The task of post war reconstruction involved a great deal of soul searching for Italian architects, resulting in a succession of ideologies. Rationalism by its association with the collapsed regime was viewed to have compromised its integrity. As Giancarlo DeCarlo remarked, "it was no longer a question of struggling with the empty question of academic culture but of preparing to solve problems that were real, urgent and of an unprecedented scale... it called for an overhaul of historic criticism which would permit the past to be reinterpreted objectively and integrated with the present in a fruitful way".45

The liberation and consequent destruction of sections of Florence with the German retreat, had a profound affect on Michelucci, and the issue of reconstruction was one he involved himself deeply with. He saw a chance for a positive regeneration of the city and the chance to "remorselessly eliminate everything from the past that people were no longer willing to accept... and which made people intolerable of each other."46 And from out of a melting pot Michelucci described (in "The Happiness of an Architect") how new forms would "testify in their unity to the understanding of a people, without mistaking their own reality and to the trust in the validity of their own time."47

As a result he actively participated in the rekindled debate on the dialectic between architecture and the notion of history and tradition, which was to characterise the subsequent course of Italian architecture.48 This could be argued as the first time in his career since the dawn of Fascism that he had adopted a polemical stance, which led in 1946 to the establishment of a new periodical La Nuova Città (The New City), inheriting a void left by Pagano's Casabella49. It was to reflect Michelucci's ideas on the city but was nonetheless constrained by local boundaries, reflecting a renewed loyalty to his native Tuscany.

Although Michelucci worked from 1945-47 on proposal sketches for the reconstruction of the area around the Ponte Vecchio he did not figure in the 1947 competition due to ensuing disagreements with the academics involved in the project (disagreements that directly resulted in his resignation in 1948). This led to what Michelucci termed "superficial reproductions of the Medieval atmosphere" and a "fear of the new gave birth to the idea of reconquering what had been lost... but this was not an idea, it was a lack of ideas."50 There is a suggestion then that it was not the outbreak of war, nor the collapse of Fascism, nor even the destruction of Florence that instigated a change in Michelucci's output, but it was a reviling of a compromised approach to reconstruction.

Michelucci's sketches for the first time suggested an urban form modelled by, what Manfredo Tafuri termed, the "interwoven fluctuations of existence",51 and a form that Michelucci referred to in "The Happiness of an Architect "as" born with the urgency and evidence of a vital fact.52 It was an architecture closely bound to the needs of a better society "not an undifferentiated, amorphous community, thought of as an anonymous whole, but a community of single, separate persons, each with his individual needs, problems, desires, hopes".53

Herein lies an apparent ambiguity between Michelucci's view of the physical city and the city (as described above). Of men who marked "the true city limits, which are not limits of material extension but of the intensity of relations" the "dimension that makes a great city of a small place, while a so-called metropolis can be infinitely peripheral."54 And at the same time the physical city that he viewed as "an organic unity" not "defined house by house, street by street, square by square" where "the buildings are not isolated as single elements but are within a real and proper system of relations".55

This notion of a fusion of city and building that Bruno Zevi was later to term "urbatecture"56 extended to a general rejection of urban planning (possibly as a result of his experiences with Rome University and E.U.R.) because, as Michelucci argued in 1946 "we do not have a clear concept of life (because if we did the city would grow spontaneously, naturally, neatly in spaces and volumes, and would be the result of the community's work)."57

So for Michelucci there was no ambiguity, architecture for him was to be "born from the observation of everyday life. From great historical processes that come from the small things which relate to the psychological habits of the particular, natural, social, and physical circumstances." It was to be an architecture of a "changeable reality which fits the individual and collective needs and changes as they change."58

Learning from Nature

For Michelucci, 1941 to 1948 were years of introspection where he seems to have begun by seeking refuge from a world abnormalised by war, journeying into the countryside to sketch from nature.59 He later recounted that one day "I was in front of a superb oak-tree and I could feel that the drawing wasn't going too well. It was an off day. So I abandoned it and went up to the oak, for a conversation with the tree, to talk to it. I peeled off one of those crusts from its bark. And what was underneath? [Life]: tiny insects running around and away in all directions. So you see, of course the drawing was going badly. I was only examining the profile, the surfaces, without noticing the life palpitating and moving around inside, underneath those surfaces... I don't understand anything about nature, nor do [I draw] trees any more. Because I feel that the drawing renders nothing of that complexity... So to succeed in understanding architecture I have to get to know this world of nature first."60

Nature was to become a recurring theme in Michelucci's writings, which have often confused a reading of his work, by associating him with the organic movement. Paolo Portughesi remarked that, evident from this point forth was a "desire to learn from nature"61 which did not constitute a gravitation towards an "organic architecture" which in itself suggested a style. Organic architecture was for Michelucci (according to Portughesi) only a valid description of a process, in the manner that a tree grows, aware of its own environment.

Michelucci in referring to "nature" in a spiritual sense (as did Frank Lloyd Wright), "as an indispensable means of orientation"62 managed to make an association with the city, believing that "nature, through the metaphors of myth and architecture, can be transferred into the mind and thereby into the city".63 He did not however advocate a return to nature "that swiftly does away with habits and situations that have developed in the city and in its history" warning that the outcome of "the citizens return to nature would be devastating."64

For Michelucci retrieving nature through architecture was not a "matter of returning to nature through its most superficial and picturesque aspects, not through a process of forced mimesis, but with an intention to discover a capacity, which is also within us, for creating reciprocal relations among the most apparently disparate situations."65 And it was this idea of the all encompassing qualities of nature at all scales, in offering "a global answer to a specific problem", that was to inform his thinking throughout the 1950s.

Returning from America in 1945, Bruno Zevi had established the APAO (Organic Architecture Association) and passionately preached the teachings of Frank Lloyd Wright, claiming Organic architecture to be "for the human being, shaped to the human scale and following the spiritual psychology and contemporary needs of man as a part of society",66 echoing in many ways Michelucci's views. However, the APAO encountered resistance soon after its inception since Zevi proposed Organic architecture as an antithesis to the Rationalist legacy. A social program involving the "INA-Casa" social housing schemes (where projects were often exiled from the city) was to further weaken the APAO and it dissolved in 1949.

Although Organic architecture did not particularly take root, as Joseph Rykwert acknowledged in 1956 "soon the word organic succeeded `rational', first used as a stylistic description but the ideas which it suggested, particularly the interest in the psychological function of architecture, had a very strong influence on many projects connected with reconstruction."67

One such reconstruction project (although a rural one) began in 1945 when Michelucci began discussions with parishioners of Collina di Pontelungo (a village close to Pistoia) and commenced work the following year on a church that occupied him until 1953, his first major project since the E.U.R. constructions of 1941. As the site was immersed in the countryside the church commented on its desolation,68 indicating the need for a human presence. This led Michelucci to adopt the theme of the farmhouse which he referred to as "the house of everyone".69 Initially this idea was at odds with many of the villagers who viewed the church as something that should be unique, whereas Michelucci employed plain white plastered walls inside, mono-pitched roofs, and bricks commonly used in rural vernacular buildings. The result was a poverty and modesty to the architecture which was as much a response to the economic constraints of the post war period, which also affected his subsequent churches such as the Chiesa delle Sante Maria e Tecla alla Vergine in Pistoia (1947-56).

Such interventions in rural areas suggested a regressive, almost romantic vision of the "community" as opposed to the anonymous metropolis. It was an approach where Michelucci's "new city" found a counterpart in the ideology of the neighbourhood, the urban sub-unit.70

Interestingly the distinctive character of the Collina church had been anticipated much earlier in a small informal chapel for the villa "il Poggiolino"71 (near to Pistoia) that Michelucci built in the grounds of the gardens he began designing in 1940 (at the time Italy entered the war), even before the collapse of the E.U.R. project. Generally overlooked, the project seems to indicate a continuum from the open air theatre in Rome and associated studies on city gardens, whilst at the same time harking back to Michelucci's earliest project, a small chapel in Caporetto, undertaken whilst he was a soldier in Caporetto in 1916.

A Striving for Reality

The years between 1951 and 1958 marked a turning point in the history of Italian architecture, referred to by Vittorio Gregotti in 1968 as a "striving for reality".72 This entailed a striving for an understanding of history and tradition, and architects such as Franco Albini, Carlo Scarpa and Ignazio Gardella (the latter two who worked with Michelucci on the re-planning of the Uffizi gallery in Florence 1953-56) began to be absorbed with an expression of materials and "craftsmanship" which produced polite and modest buildings, and were able to sew together torn urban fabrics. It was a commitment to renewal rather than the defense of an organic or Neo-Realist ideal which Michelucci pursued to great effect.

Michelucci, through a series of urban interventions such as the Borsa Merci (1948-50) in Pistoia (a commodities market later demolished in favour of the "Cassa Risparmio" (1957-65) also by Michelucci), and an "INA-Casa" housing project (pictured right) near to the Ponte Vecchio (1954-58) in Florence,73 dealt with the problems of locating buildings within Tuscan Renaissance contexts. The proportions and relationship between frame and infills, and the balance of volumes, achieved exemplary inclusions within the Medieval contexts without resorting to a mimicry of the surroundings. The approach, although skilful was sober in comparison to Florence's station twenty years earlier.

One of the most successful projects of the 1950s was the Cassa di Risparmio in Florence (1953-57). It was a new banking hall entered from the street through an old "palazzo" atrium with only one facade visible through a rear courtyard (pictured below). It was therefore an almost entirely internal experience, which contributed to its success and further illustrates that at this moment in time, Michelucci's architecture achieved the greatest success with public buildings such as churches and banks. These busy complex interiors which demanded a special quality of space, as cities in miniature, began to achieve the goals he had set out in 1947.

In the "Happiness of an Architect" Michelucci had explained that only an acceptance of the artisan's reality of work could bring about the "architect's happiness". He explained, "it was a pleasure for me to read that Stravinsky, when he began to compose, set himself the target of being in his profession what the classical masters had been; in other words, like them, a craftsman... This goal mentioned by the musician is the only one acceptable to me, as the mental and moral position of the artist towards his work".74

This was Michelucci's understanding of his role as an individual, humbly translating the needs of civilised society into form, not the romantic vision of a solitary artist, detached and possibly even misunderstood by the civilised assembly to which he belongs. His concept of craftsmanship was an intricate one, not retraceable to the reassuring formula of "craft" typical of some of his contempories.

In the "Happiness of an Architect" Michelucci stated "I don't much believe in the imagination, but I do in fantasy"75 and we can interpret `fantasy' as `invention', relating to the notion of craftsmanship. The issue here however can not simply be referred to as a contrast between the craftsman and the artist as there can be no invention or craftsmanship in isolation, certainly invention alone does not create architecture. Nor can great ideas alone represent ethical ideals. The "Craft" for Michelucci was therefore the obligatory term in the passage between civil values and architecture. As he said "I have stood stood increasingly aloof from certain speculative interests and from a polemical world, and have moved closer to a more positive world and, out of professional necessity, to the craft itself".76

For Michelucci, to construct an architectural language and appropriate forms demands a relationship between "life" and architecture. The "life" is seen as a complex factor of the political and social life of a city undergoing transformation, and the manner in which man, by his actions appropriates spaces created by architecture. In this regard Michelucci's architectural forms attempt to translate a social pledge and transform city life into architecture.

Maurice Cerasi wrote of Michelucci's buildings that "great importance is attached to the organisation of the plan, i.e. to the organisation of all the routes and places together, with precise qualities of closure or participation, looking out or recessing; [at the same time] the choices of style, taste and design which inevitably attach to environmental elements, remain autonomous, [if even] of no interest at all".77 And as Michelucci nonchalantly described in "The Happiness of an Architect" :"after a form evolves "a taste will then shape itself on the form".78

It seems therefore that precisely Michelucci's indifference to "style" made it possible (and was almost a necessary condition) in his mind, for the relationship between architecture and "life" to exist. The examination of two contrasting projects completed over a decade apart can help clarify this: The "Borsa Merci" already mentioned (1948-50) and the Osteria del Gambero Rosso (1958-63), a restaurant set within a landscaped park that in many ways was a prototype of stylistic themes employed at the Chiesa dell'Autostrada.

The two buildings are allied by a deep sense of unity of the architecture to their respective environments. Michelucci for example when referring to the Borsa Merci acknowledged that it is "in any case difficult to imagine spontaneous conversationsconversations between people looking out from the balcony on the first floor... and those pausing on the pavement. Rather the whole constitutes an expressive fact. Through the suggestion of a possible fruition, it modifies the meaning of the interior".79 In the same way the large seats at the Gambero Rosso not only suggest, but permit the creation of a sense of place.

The relationship between the architectural language and "life", is in both cases very precise and independent from the stylistic nature of the buildings. From this a conclusion can be drawn, for although Michelucci turned towards a more singular style after the Borsa Merci, closer to an expressionistic view of architecture (where he began to express a will to destroy form), it was an entirely secondary matter. And in many ways this indifference to "style" had been aired as early as 1932 in his Domus articles, where he demonstrated the linguistic similarities between a rural farmhouse and a modern villa despite their formal differences.

When asked why his buildings seemed to resist categorisation Michelucci replied "look, the important thing is to know nothing. There is a danger of applying a preconceived form to the object that we're studying, and this is already a problem".80