Lo spirito nuovo nell'architettura italiana tra le due guerre

From the mid-nineteenth century when, as Giovannoni claimed, «the dogmatic unity of a style lacked an artistic sentiment», Italian artistic culture started looking for a new identity: a “national language” able to represent the common aesthetic culture. This ‘new spirit’, or rather its inherent artistic and conceptual root, supported the research of a “new national style”. Afterall, before being a new architectural language, the style had to be intended in a philosophical and – therefore – aesthetic sense, as a new authentic value that required the reestablishment of «a link between urban life, building themes and aesthetic values of society». The ‘revolutionary’ identity of the avant-gardes, opposed to the conventional language, considered art as an opportunity and a tool for a radical moral and social change. For Kandinsky, a ‘revolution’ was a necessary condition for «a new age of the Spirit [...] which reached the inexhaustible correspondence of the beginning with the scope. In the first post-war period, ‘revolutionary’ needs of the ‘philosophical’ background of human activity matched with the apparent antinomy between the present of technical-industrial innovation and the recognized greatness of Italian artistic tradition. The architectural debate, in which the protagonists of Italian architecture participated, was characterized by the contrast between ‘Traditionalism’, i.e. academicism, and ‘Internationalism’, namely Rationalism and Functionalism. A comparison conducted preferably on the opponent alleged contradictions, which clearly led see the most profound philosophical and aesthetic reasons of the ‘new man’, sharing the social horizon of a revolution that brought new ideals ensuring a ‘new aesthetic morality’, favored the advent of the Italian ‘modern creative spirit’ of architecture.