Montare/smontare/abitare. Il contributo della ricerca italiana nella prima metà del Novecento

The design of prefabricated homes to be assembled and disassembled that characterised (without ever assuming a central role) an area of Italian architectural research during recent decades belongs in reality to the dawn of the past century and may constitute a starting point for confronting, in a different manner, the diverse problems related to the contemporary housing emergency and the rehabilitation of abandoned urban areas. The essays by Maria Argenti and Maura Percoco reconstruct the history of temporary dwellings in Italy (from the house “transportable by pack animal” from the turn of the century to more recent experiments using remodelled shipping containers), seeking the key to a possible future in the more or less recent past. In the first of the two essays, alongside homes that could be disassembled and transported on animal-drawn carriages, we find a patent for a dismountable deco villa constructed as a prototype in Rome at the beginning of the past century. There are also experiments made by such architects as Albini, Pagano, Gandolfi, Canella, Daneri, Ponti and Minoletti. Temporary workers’ housing, dismountable vacation homes, prefabricated and lightweight houses for colonial habitats or post-war constructions that could be built in a short period of time are all described as occasions for designing and experimenting with residences, increasingly based on a logic of assembly. The investigation of Italian experiments (from Rosselli and Zanuso to Mendini and Pea, from Spadolini to Morassutti and Pacanowski) continues in the second essay with an examination of successive projects and patents designed with ever-larger components. Shells, containers, monocoques or moulded elements define increasingly more confortable dwellings that are easier to assemble or simply to be unpacked.