Art: POETRY IN CONCRETE

CONCRETE enabled the ancient Romans to erect structures that surpassed in grandiosity even the marble temples of Greece and the brick palaces of Babylon. Today in Italy—and in most of Europe, where steel is scarce and expensive—concrete remains one of the cheapest and best available building materials. The Italian who, above all others, has mastered concrete and raised it to a level where it can compete with marble and granite is not an architect (though he holds honorary degrees as such) but an engineer. He is restless, wrinkled, grey Pier Luigi Nervi, 66, whose soaring exhibition halls, breath-taking airplane hangars, utilitarian salt depots and tobacco warehouses are hailed by many as among the handsomest structures built in Europe in this century. One Italian critic has found an apt phrase to describe Nervi’s work: “Poetry in concrete.”

Last week Engineer Nervi’s latest building, Rome’s Palazzetto dello Sport (see color pages) was in full operation with a solid calendar of basketball games, boxing matches and fencing competitions. Neither the appreciative spectators, gazing at the soaring, concrete-ribbed dome free of any obstructing pillars, nor the art critics, who praised it as “a masterpiece of creative genius … perfection,” would believe that Nervi had no esthetic scheme in mind. But it was a fact that he had merely worked out an orderly system for transmitting the flow of the great dome’s stress along the most logical and economical lines.

Economy Begets Art. An artist to his fingertips, Engineer Nervi protests that his buildings, which he likes to call “coverings” or “space limits,” are simply “a rigid interpretation of structural necessities.” Says he: “Beauty does not come from decorative effects, but from structural coherence.” Then he slyly adds: “In the absence of good taste, economy is the best incentive for art.”

Living up to this philosophy, Nervi has won his commissions not for esthetic reasons but through his ability to undercut his competitors, make records in construction time. His stadium in Florence, seating 35,000, cost only $2.90 per seat to build; recently he put up a three-story factory in 100 days. Faced with commodity scarcities and cutthroat competition, he has still managed to raise pure structure to the level of art.

Delight in the Ruins. Born in the Italian Alps, Nervi got his engineering degree from Bologna, served as a lieutenant in the World War I Italian Corps of Engineers. Out of the army, he worked out his apprenticeship with one of Italy’s best construction companies, then at 31 set up his own office in Rome. His first spectacular chance to prove his worth came when he won a contract to build huge airplane hangars for the Italian air force. To avoid using scarce wood and steel, Nervi created a design in reinforced concrete with prefabricated vaulting, produced vast arched structures 130 ft. wide and 330 ft. long, with no interior columns, no steel girders, no expensive form making.

Dynamited by the retreating Germans in 1944, all of the hangars were reduced to rubble. Recalls Nervi’s son Vittorio (three of his four sons work with their father): “He wanted to crawl under those hangars and die with them.” Instead, Nervi traveled to inspect the ruins on the spot, came back satisfied on one point: he discovered that the joints, made of welded rods buried in concrete, had withstood the explosions, thus proved to be the strongest element in the building.

The series of postwar structures that have skyrocketed Nervi’s fame began with a new exhibition hall in Turin. Strapped for money and materials, as usual, Nervi used his newly developed ferro-cement, composed of high-grade concrete applied in layers over a mesh of thin steel wires. By corrugating the roof to gain added strength and designing it in prefabricated sections, including skylights (see opposite), he produced a building that cost only $500,000, has one of the largest unpillared roofs in Europe.

Flowing Stone. To overcome the rough surface of concrete, Nervi casts his prefab sections in smooth plaster casts, gets a satiny surface so elegant that it has been used unadorned in restaurants and expensive spas. An important test of bare concrete as a building material will come with UNESCO’s now abuilding $7,000,000 Paris headquarters, designed by Nervi, U.S. Architect Marcel Breuer and France’s Bernard Zerhfus (TIME, May 25, 1953). To combat the tendency of concrete to age poorly, Nervi this time is adding water-repellent silicones to seal out the moistures, hopes to obtain a surface as lasting as granite.

Pier Nervi at work with concrete (he calls it “stone in motion”) is like an Indian fakir with a rope—he makes it twirl and gyrate of itself. Using his ferroconcrete, he built a 38-ft. ketch for himself, with a hull ½ in. thick, found that it sailed beautifully, was sturdy, watertight and needed no maintenance.

Long hailed at home, Nervi now has a reputation that is worldwide. Earlier this year the select American Academy and National Institute of Arts and Letters elected him an honorary member, cited him as “one of the world’s most renowned architects.” Last month Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute awarded Nervi its Frank P. Brown Medal. This month The Works of Pier Luigi Nervi, by Italian Architect Ernesto Rogers (Praeger, $10) will be published in the U.S.

Nervi feels that he is pointing toward the means of achieving a whole new architecture that will break with squared blocks and perpendicular girders. “Concrete,” he says, “is a living creature which can adapt itself to any form, any need, any stress.”