Carlo Scarpa, Aldo Rossi, Renzo Piano and Giuseppe Terragni from Madrid: Italian architecture in La Arquería

Abstract

Italian architecture shares a part of its history with the Sala de la Arquería of the Ministry of Public Works (Madrid, Spain), where a sequence of proper names and project strategies has been described along its exhibitions, defining an era. In a new-born democracy, the ministerial exhibition hall becomes a national cultural centre and focus a few years after its creation. Through the compendium of monographs exhibited inside it, it is possible to trace a route that links Carlo Scarpa, Aldo Rossi, Renzo Piano and Giuseppe Terragni to a process of rupture with the Modern Movement that inaugurates reflective territories and unpublished methods of creation. Drawings and models emerge as indispensable exhibition materials, channels of expression of the new tools of ideation: territory, context and society begin to fill the project processes at the same time as La Arquería matures as an architectural reference. The quartet of Italian architects who have visited Madrid through their monographic exhibitions, features a collection of prologues, epilogues and reencounters that connect their works with the evolution of Mediterranean architecture. This article shows unpublished material, recently digitised by the authors, with the aim of vindicating the cultural, architectural and social links between the two peninsulas.