Rural Tradition and New Architecture. The Schools of Alfredo Lambertucci

Among the first architectural works of Alfredo Lambertucci there are churches and schools. This projects occupied him between 50s and 60s. They were both issues that brought with them a strong sense of renewal, both ethical and architectural. At that time in Italy the Church was entrusting modern architects whit the design of new sacred building: in those works the desire for a renewal passed often through the recovery of stylistic features and compositive processes borrowed from the rural world. Referring to school in the very same years it was undergoing a radical reform: the need for new schools was real and urgent and architects were encouraged to experiment new functional units which exceed the centrality of the classroom. Immediately after WWII the architectural debate is aimed to re-define new features for the reconstruction; schools and churches should have been the “monuments” of a community, namely in suburbs and rural areas, public artifacts made to feed the post-war Italy ethically and spiritually. In those years were published the Carbonara’s Architettura pratica volumes and featuring, in separate volumes edited one after the other, the topic of “churches” and “buildings for education and culture”. Lambertucci, as many other colleagues did, collected this volumes in his library. He have been studying these issues for a long time and dedicated some essays to the school building, starting from a survey of the small rural schools in his hometown. Both building types, in the work of Lambertucci, are structured as rural households, both in terms of morphological and linguistic features, becoming autonomous organisms and references to the area.