Italian Modernism Seen From Across The English Channel

Disregarded until 1934, when the RIBA held an exhibition in London of the best international works of architecture made in the preceding decade, modern Italian buildings have been discovered and reevaluated thanks to photography. Here, Valeria Carullo gives an overview of British publications and shows that have lent visibility to rationalism from the 1930s to now.

- Valeria Carullo

The modern movement in architecture took hold with relative delay in Great Britain as in Italy, so it needn’t surprise us if in the early 1930s, modern Italian architecture enjoyed scarce visibility across the English Channel. Probably thanks to the 5 th Triennale di Milano exposition in 1933, architectural endeavours in Italy caught the attention of the specialised press in Britain. The Architectural Review, a prestigious magazine, dedicated several pages to the exhibition. The Architect & Building News and the Architectural Association Files also published articles on the Triennale, written by the secretary of the AA School of Architecture, Frank Yerbury. As a photographer, Yerbury had a fundamental role in introducing modern architecture from the Continent to Great Britain. That year, in 1933, he travelled to Italy from London with students of the school, and returned full of admiration and praise for the new architecture. The following year, the mostly photographic and highly popular exhibition “International Architecture 1924–1934” held at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) included work by Pietro Lingeri, Gino Levi-Montalcini, Edoardo Persico and Marcello Nizzoli, Ignazio Gardella, Luciano Baldessari and Pier Luigi Nervi. In the late 1930s, the British press dedicated sporadic articles to the subject, but almost always they contained positive judgement of the described and illustrated buildings. The second edition of Gli Elementi dell’Architettura Funzionale by Alberto Sartoris was reviewed both by The Architectural Review and its sister magazine, The Architects’ Journal. Both authors – the editor of the Review, James Maude Richards, and the critic P. Morton Shand – underlined th