An urban taboo 2: the forgotten city

In a historical period like the Fifties, characterized, for the most part, by an approach in urban design independent from the context, far from any idea of relationship with the historical urban fabric, appear, on the contrary, more than ever eloquent, all those "monumental" projects that, often involving building typologies and spatialities normally unrelated with the idea of monumentality, converge from different contexts to an idea of city alternative to the one proposed by the Modern Movement. The association, resulting from a prominently ideologically-oriented analysis, between the languages used in the pre-war period, with the ideology under which many of these projects have been realized, then meant that the post-war historiography looked at the architectural production of the last century with different contributions, often not objective, keeping as the only prerequisite for modernity, the reference to the Modern Movement, considered the only yardstick for any "value judgment”. As a result of this attitude, some emblematic cases of the so-called "projects of the Reconstruction" have undergone a "damnatio memoriae", marginalized from the events of the Great History of the Contemporary Architecture and labeled, most of the time, as ideological products of the authoritarianism or as the trawlings of a larger "nineteenth-century thought."