LOOK INSIDE: Architecture as Living Act, Leonardo Ricci

table of contents

Foreword Absence from History Anthony Vidler

9

Introduction

13

PART ONE 1

Florence in the years of the reconstruction

1.1

“A condition with no rest from absolute striving”

19

1.2

The Florentine school and Giovanni Michelucci

25

1.3

The “two Leonardis”: Ricci and Savioli

33

1.4

The competitions for the reconstruction of the bridges in Florence (1945–48)

43

1.5

The flower market of Pescia (1949–51)

49

2

Until the early fifties

2.1

The first community buildings: Agàpe at Prali (1946–51)

53

2.2

The Parisian years: Ricci the painter and existentialism

61

2.3

Ricci’s home-studio and the experience of Monterinaldi (1949–63)

69

3

The houses

3.1

An inevitable comparison: Frank Lloyd Wright

89

3.2

The “theoretical house” as a model

93

3.3

New ways to live: prestigious clients and further experiments

101

appendix

128

INTERLUDE 4

Anonymous (20th Century)

4.1

The philosophical context: existentialism and phenomenology

149

4.2

The myth and the absurd

155

4.3

It is enough to exist

157

4.4

The architect: the last humanist

159

4.5

There is a whole new world opening up

163

ARCHITECTURE AS A LIVING ACT. Leonardo Ricci Maria Clara Ghia

PART TWO 5

The Sicilian experience

5.1 Riesi ou la force de l’Agàpe

169

5.2 The Monte degli Ulivi community-village (1962–68)

173

6

Fragments: from the exhibition to the macrostructure

6.1 The turning point in the sixties

181

6.2 Exhibits: between architecture and sculpture

185

6.3 Other living and working spaces

197

6.4 The residential complex for the Sorgane district, Florence (1962–66)

215

7

Visions: from the Earth-City to the real city

7.1

Projects for “non-alienated” men

223

7.2 The seventies and eighties: competitive tenders and the last constructions

243

7.3 An “archeology of forms”: the city of the dead and the city of justice

259

appendix

268

Afterwords Orazio Carpenzano, Antonella Greco

284

Biography: Leonardo Ricci

288

Bibliography

290

Figure credits and List of abbreviations

299

Acknowledgments

300

Foreword Absense from History Anthony Vidler

Foreword Absence from History Anthony Vidler

In his seminal article, “Norm and Form,” published in 1963, the art historian Ernst Gombrich admitted that the stylistic categories imposed by art and architectural history were founded on that he called “the principle of exclusion.”

This principle, based on norms of taste or morphological coherence, has often required the admission of new or revised terms - for example “Baroque” in the late nineteenth century or “Mannerism” in the early twentieth. But it has equally often led to important exclusions, and the absence of works that were centrally important in their own time but were either too early or too late to be counted within the “movements” identified by historians, or, in the case of more recent practices, the victim of partisan disputes.

The architecture of Leonardo Ricci is a case in point. Lauded by Bruno Zevi, ignored by Manfredo Tafuri, he is absent from most of the recent “comprehensive” histories of modern or postmodern architecture. A student of Michelucci, whose built work at least accorded him a dismissive paragraph by Tafuri, Ricci had the misfortune to be overshadowed in the late sixties by his own students in the groups Superstudio and Archizoom. More importantly, though, for the characterization of his importance, was his very early adoption of ecological principles in his early housing works - too early for the seventies to remember, and his subsequent “neo-Brutalist” work, too late for inclusion in a movement deemed by architectural pundits like Charles Jencks to be “exhausted” by the advent of “Postmodernism” in the seventies. His work, exhibiting no consistent “style” but inspired by the context and opportunities of the moment, was equally uncomfortable in the dominant movements of the fifties (Neo-Realism) and the emerging force of “Neo-Rationalism” in the seventies. And, it has to be noted, that his own reluctance to embrace a canonical role as “architect,” but remain, in the title of his 1962 manifesto, “anonymous,” did not help this state of affairs.

Recently, however, with the opening up of a number of archives, a number of younger and unprejudiced scholars have begun a comprehensive reassessment with exhibitions and preliminary monographs. As in the case of other absentees - one might cite the example of Fernand Pouillon in France, and Cedric Price in England - the nature of his contribution emerges as a powerful complement 9

ARCHITECTURE AS A LIVING ACT. Leonardo Ricci Maria Clara Ghia

to those previously canonized “masters” of the Modern Movement. His extraordinary inventiveness; his deep conviction of the collective and social role of architecture, both as habitat and symbol; his ability to respond to the natural environment; his innovative approach to the spatial organization of public institutions; and his genuine sense of the end of the era of “stars,” all combine to resonate with our present concerns, and impel his reinstatement as a figure neither too early nor too late, but timely, precisely in this time of environmental and social urgency.

The present monograph, the result of many years of research in multiple private and public archives, opens up, for the first time, the “lost” areas of interpretation and understanding that have the effect of realizing a full image of the practicing and theorizing architect, hitherto “anonymous” but now revealed as a complex, deeply committed, consummate form-giver, and material craftsman dedicated to architecture as a living act. In the highly politicized Florence of the forties to the sixties, practicing an architecture that was both communitarian and environmentally sensitive; experimenting with the nature of the “house” as a place of life and work; finding his place as an artist and thinker in the Paris of the fifties, conceiving of “model” theoretical projects under the influence of French existentialism and phenomenological thought, developing as a writer and teacher in the United States; finding his place as an “anonymous” architect with all the resulting implications; returning to community building in Sicily; mentoring a new generation of radical students in Florence in the mid-sixties; and finally inventing an entirely new public symbolism for justice and death, Leonardo Ricci emerges in this brilliant synopsis as one of the most powerful and prescient - architects of our time.

Anthony Vidler, New York, September 2021

10

Foreword Absense from History Anthony Vidler

Leonardo Ricci, “Come una notte di luna” (Like on a moonlit night), oil on canvas, 1958 (CRM)

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ARCHITECTURE AS A LIVING ACT. Leonardo Ricci Maria Clara Ghia

In Earth-City the houses have started to move. What used to be isolated blocks, lined up one next to the other, have opened themselves, as it were, to catch the wind and move all over the earth Leonardo Ricci 12

Introduction

Introduction

“Our city is Earth-City,” wrote Leonardo Ricci in his autobiographical book of reflections Anonymous (20th Century), published in New York in 19621, and Hashim Sarkis wrote about “Architecture as World” in 2020, while presenting the themes of the 2020 Venice Architecture Biennale, entitled How will we live together?, which he was due to curate before the Covid-19 pandemic struck and which finally inaugurated in 2021.

Every building is a limited part of the world, with its own aesthetic qualities and its own rules, but its boundaries also expand to contrast with or conform to its context, establishing new spatial relationships and a new geography that is perhaps even capable of what Sarkis describes as “calling out the curvature of the earth.” There is a need for “new inhabitation,” in which the usual sequence of architectural spaces does not necessarily have to be maintained, and indeed the way they are planned can stimulate new ideas and encourage new habits.

“New eyes” are essential, for living in a different way, opening ourselves up to the search for new experiences and their fulfilment.

Of course I do not want necessarily to engage in a discussion on the relevance of Leonardo Ricci’s work today. It was created in another historical and social context that is no longer our own, and those who have read Anonymous are well aware that he himself would be the first to object if we tried to present him as a “master” who designed perfect forms with an eternally valid symbolic resonance or relevance. As regards “the masters”—Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, or Mies van der Rohe—Ricci writes that one has to fall in love with them and then emancipate oneself from them. It is necessary to find one’s own path that corresponds to one’s own time and one’s own needs, that vary for every specific case and moment.

Nevertheless, in the complex present that we live in, we continue to explore several basic themes closely connected to Ricci’s theoretical research and architectural production, especially if we consider his work not so much from a formal as from an existential point of view, as he himself would have referred to it. In Anonymous he states: “In Earth-City the houses have started to move.

What used to be isolated blocks, lined up one next to the other, have opened themselves, as it were, to catch the wind and move all over the earth.”2 This

1 Ricci, Leonardo. Anonymous (20th Century). New

York: Braziller, 1962, 196. It was translated into Italian as Anonimo del XX secolo, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1965. From now on I will refer to this book simply as Anonymous.

2 Ibid., 233.

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ARCHITECTURE AS A LIVING ACT. Leonardo Ricci Maria Clara Ghia

3 Zevi, Bruno. “Leonardo Ricci (1918–94), il migliore architetto italiano” (Leonardo Ricci (1918–94), the best Italian architect). L’architettura cronache e storia (470, 1994): 863.

14

conception of the integration of architectural forms with the landscape and the movements of human beings is particularly relevant in the present moment, when there is an urgent need to reconsider the relationships between internal and external spaces; between the house, courtyard, street and square; and between the city and the countryside, because the urban congestion to which we have become all too accustomed, if not addicted, is starting to prove more and more problematic. Our overcrowded metropolises must be reconceived as systems spread out upon the land and connected by efficient infrastructures.

Ricci’s wide-ranging research was dominated by the quest for a habitat in which architecture would be a natural thing, complete and well-defined, but also open and amenable to the possibility of mutation. In his every creation he tried to construct an organic architectural entity that would respond to the needs of its inhabitants and users, connecting the body to the house, the neighborhood and the city, in a continuum that would make it possible and practical for people to engage in free actions and discover new ways of existing.

The influential architect, critic, and author Bruno Zevi, with his usual emphasis, defined Leonardo Ricci as “the best Italian architect.”3 What makes Ricci’s designs so unique is his conception of space as an existential factor, as well as the way he applied his imagination to buildings and structures with an immense variety of dimensions and purposes. He was extremely prolific, and his productive activity spanned almost half a century, from the mid-forties until the late eighties.

The present volume is not intended to be a complete and exhaustive study of Ricci’s work—there is still more research on him to be done. The aim of this study is to make a point with the archive materials discovered until now, some of which have never been published, to investigate the entire range of his activity during his life by examining some of his most interesting projects, and putting them into the context of the current architectural panorama. Ricci’s work was not entirely unaffected by the prevailing trends, but it was always coherently connected to his most basic aims: to translate into an architectural form the dynamism of phenomena and the incessant flow of life, which must not be restricted by pre-established modalities, and to seek the shared factors that unite us and make us similar as humans, so that an authentic bond of understanding and communication can be established between the architect and those who inhabit his creations.

The value of Ricci’s work was recognized – although perhaps not fully understood—during his lifetime and in 1958 he was awarded the gold medal at the 11th Milan Triennale. He received many prestigious commissions throughout his career, but then his multifaceted oeuvre suffered many years of neglect, which some publications in Italy have tried to remedy, mainly by analyzing certain specific themes in his work, such as residential projects, communitarian villages, macrostructures, or urban planning schemes. This book is the latest of these studies, and it intends to give this exceptional figure the recognition he

Introduction

deserves within the panorama of Italian and international architecture following the Second World War. This volume is divided into three sections, the first of which contextualizes Ricci’s professional activity in the passionate climate of post-war reconstruction in Italy. The connection of his work to that of his friend-teacher Michelucci and his friend-colleague Savioli is considered; the proposals for the damaged historical center of Florence are examined; and by analyzing the Waldensian community of Agàpe and the “village” of Monterinaldi, two predominant themes in Ricci’s work are introduced: communitarian projects and experimental family residences.

The next section is an “interlude,” which concentrates on Anonymous (20th Century), the book-diary written in the first half of the sixties, in which Ricci critically analyzed his work in the areas of painting, architecture, and urban planning. He expressed his ideas in a very personal way, which is more “existential” than “existentialist,” in a search for the primary and authentic needs of society and of mankind, seen as the essential requirements for the architect’s task.

The third and final part starts with an analysis of Ricci’s experience in the community-village of Monte degli Ulivi in Sicily, and proceeds to consider his projects for non-residential structures, and his part in the creation of the Sorgane neighborhood of Florence. The book concludes with an analysis of the architect’s visionary projects for “Earth-City” macrostructures, as well as his last competitive tenders and projects, after his resignation from his post as Dean of the University of Florence and during his stay in Venice.

In the context of the changes in the approach to architecture in the sixties and seventies Ricci may seem in some ways a timeless figure who refused to conform with contemporary developments and was thus independent of any historical context. He was incessantly engaged in the search for an architecture that he felt could save mankind, and his attitudes often conflicted with situations that he found unacceptable, or with the methods and approaches of his colleagues, which were often different or even completely opposed to his own. The way he always threw himself into his work, as if it were a fight to the death between the artist and his creations, has meant that his work has widely been misunderstood, being generally considered as deriving from an individualistic and therefore isolated outlook.

Despite the selection of Ricci’s numerous projects that I have been compelled to make in this volume, I hope that I have succeeded in painting as complete a picture as possible of the activity and the explosive energy of this rather complex and even tormented figure, who deserves to be reconsidered among the masters of Italian architecture in the second half of the twentieth century.

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ARCHITECTURE AS A LIVING ACT. Leonardo Ricci Maria Clara Ghia

4

32

Florence in the year of reconstruction The “two Leonardis”: Ricci and Savioli

1.3 The “two Leonardis”: Ricci and Savioli

Leonardo Ricci and Leonardo Savioli were Giovanni Michelucci’s favorite students, but they had very differing temperaments, as Ricci was impulsive and extroverted, while Savioli was reserved and silent. Affectionately dubbed “the two Leonardis” by their fellow students, they would become the “hard core” of the Florentine school of architecture after the war.

Before and during the war Savioli drew corpses in the anatomical dissecting room while, at the same time, Ricci was drawing mannequins posed as if they were dead bodies. They were clearly both asking similar questions from different points of view, reflecting on the theme of death as the measure of all human actions, and examining the primary functions that give life to a body.

Savioli wrote: If … we presume to act before knowing the meaning of our actions, it is evident that they will have nothing to do with life itself. It is a question of rediscovering our own roots before being able to say whether the city will be constructed vertically or horizontally like a ribbon, as a garden city of three million or twenty thousand inhabitants.31 From the beginning they used their own individual approaches ​​to elaborate ideas for new kinds of architecture: for Ricci it was painting, while for Savioli it was the graphic arts. They made studies of textures, grains, weaves, and read within them the signs and indications for ​​possible architectural and urban structures.

The human body is investigated almost as if it were a landscape, the different parts of which are the constitutive elements of a city.32 In particular, Ricci focused on figurative themes drawn from ancestral myths, with symbolic figures engaged in ritual dances, embraces, struggles, births, and deaths. Ricci was inspired by abstractionism and then primitivism: Picasso, Schiele, Giacometti and Ernst, until he too abandoned himself to an explosive gesturalism, in the wake of the latest pictorial developments in North America and Europe, and following his discovery of existentialist thought.33 Giulio Carlo Argan was particularly struck by a nascent urban planning methodology in Savioli’s graphic and pictorial work that seemed to be based on:

31 Savioli, Leonardo. “Per un significato più vero della pianificazione” (For a truer meaning of planning).

Architetti (2, 1950): 21.

32 See Paolini, Claudio; Tolu, Eleonora (edited

by). “Registrare l’esistenza”. La pittura e il disegno di Leonardo Savioli. Catalogue for the exhibition (Museum of Contemporary and Twentieth Century Art of Monsummano Terme, March 28–June 27, 2010). Florence: Edizioni Polistampa, 2010.

33 See Uzzani, Giovanna. “Pittura liberata e libera”

(Liberated and free painting). In Leonardo Ricci 100.

Scrittura, pittura architettura 100 note a margine dell’Anonimo del XX secolo, (Leonardo Ricci 100. Writing, painting architecture: 100 marginal notes in Anonymous), Catalogue for the exhibition at the refectory of Santa Maria Novella, Florence, April 12–May 26, 2019). Edited by Ghia, Maria Clara; Ricci, Clementina; Dattilo, Ugo, 27-32, Florence: Dida press, University of Florence, 2019.

4 Leonardo Savioli, house on via Piagentina, Florence, 1964–65 (GB 2021)

33

ARCHITECTURE AS A LIVING ACT. Leonardo Ricci Maria Clara Ghia

5

34

Florence in the year of reconstruction The “two Leonardis”: Ricci and Savioli

6

35

ARCHITECTURE AS A LIVING ACT. Leonardo Ricci Maria Clara Ghia

2 Until the early fifties

The condition for happiness is not to be lonely.

Ricci, Anonymous, cit., 31.

52

Until the early 1950s The first community buildings: Agàpe at Prali (1946–51)

2.1 The first community buildings: Agàpe at Prali (1946–51)

Starting in 1939 Ricci was a reserve second lieutenant in the engineer corps of the Italian army and he saw active duty in Sicily. In Anonymous he wrote a moving description of the retreat from the island after the allied landings. He and his fellow soldiers had to cross the Straits of Messina to the Italian mainland on overloaded rafts. Thousands of men made their escape by night: a mass of strangers, all crowded together, “Never so much together, perhaps, as on that night.”53 After they had disembarked, their first place of refuge was a railway tunnel, inhabited by “a strange society” of exhausted and hungry people, as well as starving children. Ricci asks himself if that tunnel was “more a city than our cities today, more a housing project than our low-cost housing projects, more a home than the homes with refrigerators and dish-washers,” because there was a feeling of human solidarity in that place, and because, after the war, the only possibility was to live in mystery, and “the only society was to be found in the feeling that we were all in the same boat, as though the earth were a ship navigating in space, gathering all of us together in this one trip toward this one goal.”54 Upon his return to Florence, Ricci was reunited with his comrades in the Resistance and his young colleagues. In 1944 he opened a professional studio together with Savioli and Gori. His first project was for the partisans’ cemetery in Settignano, followed by those for the competitions for planning the bridges and the destroyed areas of the city center, which we have already discussed. But Ricci’s meeting with Tullio Vinay (1909–1996), an anti-fascist Waldensian theologian, would be particularly decisive for his future, and they would remain in contact due to their shared ethical ideas and their communitarian vocation. Vinay had lived in Florence from 1934 to 1946, and he had managed to save dozens of Jews by hiding them in an apartment in the Waldensian headquarters on via Manzoni. As soon as the war was over, the pastor entrusted the young architect with the construction of the ecumenical center of Agàpe, in the municipality of Prali, in the Piedmont region.55 Agàpe means “brotherly love”56 and the community was founded on the ideal of brotherhood, as a place where “it is possible to live and work together, outside ideologies, on the concrete plane of hours and days.”57 Ricci would come to see the creation of the Waldensian community as a task with a strongly existential

53 Ricci. Anonymous, 164.

54 Ibid., 166.

55 The building work at Prali is analyzed in detail in

Ghia, Maria Clara. “Un atto d’amore vissuto: Leonardo Ricci e l’esperienza comunitaria” (An act of lived love: Leonardo Ricci and the community experience) in Leonardo Ricci 100, cit., 75–82 and Ghia, Maria Clara. Basta esistere. Leonardo Ricci: il pensiero e i progetti per le comunità (Just exist. Leonardo Ricci: his thought and his projects for communities). Rome: Bruno Zevi Foundation, 2012. (This essay won the Bruno Zevi International Prize).

56 “The oil that Mary Magdalene sprinkles on Christ’s

feet ... Agàpe is a place where men meet” wrote Tullio Vinay in the journal “Gioventù Evangelica” (Evangelical Youth) on February 17, 1948, quoted in Costanzo, Michele.

Leonardo Ricci and the idea of community space. Macerata: Quodlibet, 2009, 51.

57 Ricci, Leonardo. “Nascita di un nuovo villaggio per

una comunità in Sicilia” (The birth of a new village for a community in Sicily). Domus (409, 1963): 5.

53

ARCHITECTURE AS A LIVING ACT. Leonardo Ricci Maria Clara Ghia

35

94 Guègen, Pierr. “Coexistence des arts plastiques,” an article conserved in the “Logbooks” at Ricci’s home-studio in Monterinaldi.

78

She was a charismatic personality, who was central to the academic and cultural life of Florence at that time. Pierre Guéguen wrote to Vigo to highlight the relevance of the reflection that the exhibition had stimulated on the relationship between the domestic space and the work of art, as a continuation of the initiative of the Parisian group Espace, which had organized a similar exhibition on the French Riviera in 1954.94 Sculptures, ceramics, paintings, and mosaics by sixty-six Italian and foreign artists were displayed in direct contact with Ricci’s new houses, along the external pathways, in the gardens, on the terraces, and in the surrounding natural setting. Corrado Cagli, Emilio Greco, Renato Guttuso, Enrico Baj, Arnaldo Pomo-

Until the early 1950s Ricci’s home-studio and the experience of Monterinaldi (1949–63)

35 - 36 La Cava” (The Quarry) International outdoor exhibition of plastic arts, Monterinaldi, Florence, sculptures

by André Bloc and Pierluca Degli Innocenti (GG 1955, CRM) 36

doro, Mirko Basaldella, and André Bloc exhibited their works, and Bloc’s bronze sculpture still stands on the roof terrace of Ricci’s home-studio where it echoes the curve of Brunelleschi’s dome that can be seen when one looks down toward Florence. The exhibition closely examined the needs of contemporary living and considered the most suitable ways to display artworks, contemplating how best to break away from “easel production” and establish associations between architecture, painting, and sculpture. Thus in Monterinaldi the complex interrelations between man-made constructions and nature—art, architecture, and the landscape—were presented in various different ways, each one judiciously planned and studied for each specific house.

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41 General plan of the Village of Monterinaldi, Florence, 1957 (CSAC)

84

Until the early 1950s Ricci’s home-studio and the experience of Monterinaldi (1949–63)

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138

The houses appendix

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The houses appendix

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The houses appendix

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ARCHITECTURE AS A LIVING ACT. Leonardo Ricci Maria Clara Ghia

158 Ibid., 229.

159 Ibid., 245.

160 Ricci. Anonymous, cit., 13.

161 Ricci. “Space in architecture,” cit., 7–10.

162 See in this book on p. 182.

it lives, but subjects them to criticism, and every true work of architecture introduces something new, not only when it is a good machine for inhabiting or when it implies an ideology of habitation, but when it criticizes, by its mere existence, the modalities and ideologies of habitation that preceded it.158 That to which architecture gives a concrete form and shape: a certain way of living together and inhabiting a space, does not only belong to the specific language of architecture, but to a primordial “anthropological code,” since it concerns the conditions of authentic existence for humankind on this planet. To properly utilize this code, the architect must absorb the set of conventionally accepted rules, and then subversively reject them, so that he can say something different in each specific context, in a language that is neither always the same nor always his own: The architect finds himself condemned, by the nature of his work ... to be perhaps the only and last humanist in contemporary society: obliged to think of the totality to the degree in which he becomes a specialized sectorial technician, dedicated to specific operations and not to metaphysical statements.159 Having developed a structure suitable for the functions identified by a sociological, political, and psychological analysis, the architect must then address the issue of the “event.” The architect is not the creator of change, but he prefigures it, interprets it, brings about the conditions, for its creation and gives it new potential qualities. In the longed-for but never-attained condition of anonymity, neither architecture nor the architect play the leading role. The only protagonist is life itself and its condition of perpetual change and movement, which constitutes an infinity of possible events that the architect can try to embrace and imagine through designing and planning. Ricci declares that: “Form is a consequence of the potential vitality intrinsic in an object.”160 Ricci feels that the architectural form must be born through an act of love and a sort of conception, just as in the case of a living organism: “Taking possession of the land or terrain is analogous to possessing a woman through an act of love.”161 The architect, in a similar way to a love affair, is involved in a creative process, without knowing how it will end. He is unable to design every aspect, transmit all the sensations or communicate all the feelings. Architecture is located in a gray area somewhere between geometry and phenomenology, intellect and emotion, esprit de géométrie and esprit de finesse:162 In the debut of the design for every relevant and innovative work ... a rational, objective scientific component coexists and cooperates (to such an extent that it can be codified and transmitted as a shared language) with

160

163 Ricci quoted in Nardi. Leonardo Ricci, cit., 57.

Anonymous (20th Century) The architect: the last humanist

a more mysterious, instinctively direct component, the origin of which we do not know and which we are very often unable to control. I would almost say that we partly own a work of architecture, but we are also partly owned by it.163

84 “Contemplazione della morte” (Contemplation of death), oil on canvas, 1948 (CRM)

161

ARCHITECTURE AS A LIVING ACT. Leonardo Ricci Maria Clara Ghia

88 - 89

176

90 - 91

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116 - 117 Section drawings for the Teatro dei Leggieri, San Gimignano, Tuscany, 1962–65, unrealized (CSAC)

116

206

Fragments: from the exhibition to the macrostructure Other living and working spaces

117

of designing a yarn factory near Prato. Who would have imagined it! … It was one of my favorite themes. But I had never imagined that one day a client would look for me to do something practical, functional and rational.”220 The client required the integration of manufacturing, commercial, and residential functions and Ricci resolved the problem in a simple and effective way, with the collaboration of the engineer Ernesto Trapani, who was working with him on the structures for the Balmain House at the same time. In fact, both of these projects expressed the principles of dynamism and structural freedom to the utmost. The materials were local stone, reinforced concrete, and glass.

Two separate projects were presented, but several fundamental elements were substantially unaltered in both. These were the large central hall parallel to the main road, for spinning and carding, the two warehouses at the rear where transportation vehicles could arrive and depart, the location of the main entrance, and the accommodation areas at the back, provided with a kitchen, a bathroom, and two bedrooms.

220 Nardi. Leonardo Ricci, cit., 33–122.

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135

134

230

134 - 135 Model of the macrostructure entitled “floating city port,” realized with the Florence University students, 1966 (pu, LVM)

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Visions: from the Earth-City to the real city appendix

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Visions: from the Earth-City to the real city appendix

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ARCHITECTURE AS A LIVING ACT. Leonardo Ricci Maria Clara Ghia

Biography: Leonardo Ricci

(Rome, June 8, 1918–Venice, September 29, 1994)

Of French-Swiss origin and Waldensian education, Leonardo Ricci is the second of four sons of Giuditta de Giorgi and Raniero Ricci, an engineer. Although probably influenced by his father’s occupation for future professional choices, since he was a boy he showed a decisive vocation as a painter, and this aptitude was a profound source in his multiform cultural activity.

After moving from Rome to Turin, Ricci arrived in Venice and then Padua, where he had his first exhibition in his early twenties. In 1936 he was in Florence, enrolled in the Faculty of Architecture. Here he first encountered Giovanni Michelucci, his mentor. He graduated with him and became his assistant and collaborator.

Michelucci’s studio brought together the most promising young architects of the so-called Florentine school, including Leonardo Savioli, Edoardo Detti, and Giuseppe Giorgio Gori. The group’s early projects were interrupted by the Second World War and Ricci, second lieutenant of the civil engineering since 1939, saw active duty in Sicily.

During the retreat from the island, Ricci encountered a foreign humanity and started believing that “the only law was mystery” and envisaging the earth as “a ship navigating in space, gathering all of us together in this one trip toward this one goal” [Anonymous (20th Century), New York: Braziller, 1962, 166].

Back in Florence, Ricci met his fellow members of the Resistance, including some of his young colleagues. He also met Tullio Vinay, an anti-fascist Waldensian pastor to whom he remained always close, sharing his ethical sense and his calling for community life. In 1944 Ricci opened his professional studio with Savioli and Gori and in 1946 they made several projects for the competitive tenders for rebuilding the bridges of Florence, participating in the debate concerning reconstruction “as it was where it was” advocated by Bernard Berenson, and supporting Michelucci’s idea that the wounds of the damaged city could present an opportunity for experimentation and renewal.

Also in 1946, Tullio Vinay entrusted Ricci with the design of the ecumenical center of Agàpe, and his experience in this community in the north of Italy would have a decisive influence on his approach to architecture in the next years.

Two important achievements soon followed: the flower market in the Tuscan city of Pescia in Tuscany, designed in collaboration with Enzo Gori, Giuseppe Giorgio Gori, Leonardo Savioli, and Emilio Brizzi and the communitarian experiment of the houses of Monterinaldi at the north of Florence, which successfully showed how residential buildings could be integrated with the surrounding landscape. In addition to the house for his family, Ricci designed a series of other residences over time. Thanks to the critical fortune of Monterinaldi, Ricci will also venture into a second residential village in Montepiano which, however, was never completed and today counts just five residences.

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Biography: Leonardo Ricci (Rome June 8, 1918–Venice September 29, 1994)

In the meantime, in his works as a painter, a new and disruptive energy appears in the use of color and stylized geometric shapes. He moved from a figurative language, composed of archaic forms that explore the sphere of dreams, life, death, and fertility, to an abstract lexicon as a sort of psychic automatism that also finds its models in Action painting. He was inspired by the art of the expressionists and the primitivists, ranging from Schiele to Picasso. While exhibiting his paintings alongside those of Alberto Giacometti, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso in the art galleries of Paris, Ricci met Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, assimilating their existentialist ideas. He inaugurated his solo exhibition at the Galerie Pierre, with a good critical resonance. In Italy he became a friend of Corrado Cagli and the Basaldella brothers, Afro and Mirko, who belonged to the group of artists that gravitated around Fiamma Vigo’s Numero gallery in Florence. In 1955 Ricci opened his home-studio in Monterinaldi to the public in the context of an exhibition entitled “La cava” that he had organized with Vigo. A series of works by André Bloc, Mirko, and Arnaldo Pomodoro, among others, were exhibited outdoors all over the hill around the house.

In the fifties Ricci started teaching at the University of Florence, first as assistant professor, then as full professor and finally as dean of the faculty of architecture. It was due to his initiative that Umberto Eco was invited to Florence for his first university teaching position. Ricci was a charismatic teacher and he actively participated in the debate sparked off by the protests of 1968 but he resigned in 1973, disappointed by what he saw as a failure in the mission of the University, and moved to Venice.

In the fifties the most interesting field of Ricci’s architectural experimentation was the design of private residences. He planned a number of villas with organic-expressionist features for some prominent clients, the most famous of which are the house for Elisabeth Mann Borgese, the daughter of Thomas Mann, in Forte dei Marmi and the house for Pierre Balmain on the Island of Elba. He also experimented with other types of building, for example the fascinating project for the Goti factory near Prato. In 1958 he was awarded the gold medal at the eleventh Milan Triennale.

A particularly important commission in the early sixties was that of the La Nave (The Ship), a macrostructure within the urban plan for the new district of Sorgane in Florence. This was a complex and flexible structure with a distinctly brutalist quality, with which Ricci tried to overcome the aspects of closure and separation that he had identified in Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation.

In this period, at the invitation of his friend Pastor Vinay, Ricci also designed a community-village at Riesi in Sicily, a difficult location under the control of the local mafia. The initial scheme will have to undergo some changes due to economic constraints. Although it was never com-

pleted, his project for the Ecclesia is of great interest, a fascinating example of informal architecture in Italy with a dynamic and yet truncated form, like a broken shell.

Between 1959 and 1973 he had been invited as Visiting Professor on various occasions at MIT, Pennsylvania State University, Kentucky University, and Florida University. With his students he created a series of large-scale urban planning models. In 1970, as part of the Model Cities federal urban aid program, he designed a macrostructure for a neighborhood of 100,00 inhabitants in Miami, a cutting-edge project which expressed his extremely original contemporary approach.

His professional and teaching experiences, his American stay, and his personal visit to some of the buildings of the Masters, such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier, led Ricci to make a point by writing his book-diary Anonymous (20th century), published

by George Braziller in New York in 1962.

In the meantime, Ricci was also working on projects on the most diverse typologies. In 1964 he set up the Expressionism exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence and in 1967 he was invited by Bruno Zevi, Giulio Carlo Argan and Umberto Eco to design a section of the Italian pavilion at the Montreal Expo, together with Carlo Scarpa and Bruno Munari.

In the seventies, his last and in many ways most controversial works include the competition projects for the Centro Direzionale business district of Florence and for the Contreprojet pour les Halles in Paris, the gigantic pyramidal structure of the Cemetery of Jesi in 1984, and the Justice Palace of Savona in 1987. Finally, in the eighties, he designed the law courts on via di Novoli in Florence, a building that would be much criticized due to the failure to implement some of the fundamental indications in the original project, when it was finally completed some eighteen years after Ricci’s death.

Ricci’s work is unique in the conception of architecture as “spatial conformation of existence” that would respond to the needs and the “living acts” of those who inhabit it, and in the attempt to embrace in his designs the dynamism of phenomena and the incessant flow of life, that cannot be contained in pre-established forms. His approach led him to an original way of living life on earth. His projects appear as unfulfilled solutions to his relentless interrogations about the authentic sense of being in the world.

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ARCHITECTURE AS A LIVING ACT. Leonardo Ricci Maria Clara Ghia

Acknowledgments

This book is the result of the study that I have been carrying out since 2011. Leonardo Ricci’s work has accompanied me over the years, and every time I dealt with other topics, I ended up reviewing it again.

After attaining the Bruno Zevi International Prize for the first essay I wrote on Ricci, my research has advanced first with the publication of a book edited with Antonella Greco (Leonardo Ricci. Monterinaldi, Balmain, Mann Borgese, Rome: Palombi 2012), and then on the occasion of the centenary of Ricci’s birth, when many unpublished drawings and documents were brought to light. These steps led me to the making of the exhibition Leonardo Ricci 100. Scrittura, pittura, architettura: 100 note a margine dell’ “Anonimo del XX secolo,” curated together with Clementina Ricci and Ugo Dattilo, that took place at the Refectory of Santa Maria Novella in Florence in the spring of 2019.

Lastly, I had the opportunity to draw some conclusions thanks to the Enrico Guidoni Award I received in 2019. I tried to paint a portrait as complete as possible of Ricci’s activity and writing in the Italian version of this volume, published in 2021 by Steinhäuser Verlag & Kamps, Wuppertal, Germany (open access only). This book is a revised and expanded edition, by which I hope to make Ricci’s work known to an international audience.

I would like to thank Clementina Ricci, who has been by my side in this research and with whom I have established a wonderful partnership. With her, I thank Milena Ricci, Gerd Olsson Ricci, Linnea Ricci, Elena Sofia Ricci, and I send an affectionate thought to Poccetto Ricci.

I thank the jury of the Guidoni Award and the Associazione di Storia della Città, in particular the President Marco Cadinu for his attention and openness.

I thank the fellow members of the National Committee for the centenary of Ricci’s birth celebrations: Andrea Aleardi, Giovanni Bartolozzi, Marco Brizzi, Giuseppe Capochin, Ugo Carughi, Aldo Colonetti, Caludia Conforti, Francesco Dal Co, Antonella Greco, Margherita Guccione, Alessandro Jaff, Giovanni Leoni, Saverio Mecca, Ricardo Scofidio, Carlo Sisi, Adachiara Zevi, and Stefania Prodon; and I remember Gillo Dorfles, Marco Dezzi Bardeschi; and Adolfo Natalini, who sadly left us in the very year of the celebrations. With them, I recall with gratitude Maria Grazia Dallerba and Lara Vinca Masini. In particular, I thank Andrea Aleardi, Director of the Giovanni Michelucci Foundation, for his constant presence and helpfulness.

Within the Sapienza University, I thank Antonella Greco for her great generosity in sharing methods and knowledge, she has inspired me for a long time with her brilliance; the Dean Orazio Carpenzano who welcomed my ‘Ricci meditations’ to the point of including them in the research of the Doctoral School of the Department of Architecture of Sapienza; and Roberto Secchi, who first introduced me to Ricci’s work.

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Within the CSAC - Communication Studies and Archive Center in Parma, I thank Paolo Andrei, Francesca Zanella, and Simona Riva.

I thank Claudia Conforti and her colleagues for inspiring me with their research on Giovanni Michelucci, Luca Barontini, and Fabio Fabbrizzi, for sharing with me their study on Leonardo Savioli and Giorgio Gori.

I thank Giorgio Neri, owner of the Balmain house in Elba.

I thank Ugo Dattilo, our common passion for Ricci developed into a good friendship; Giovanni Bartolozzi, because his work on Ricci supports mine and he generously shared with me some study materials. I thank Andrea Aleardi, Gianluca Buoncore, Pietro Carafa, Alessandro Guidi, Alessandro Lanzetta, Lorenzo Morandi, Michela Sardelli, and Beatrice Conforti for sharing with me their beautiful pictures. To the latter I also owe a fundamental help in finding some archive documents.

I thank Tris Bruce for his accurate translation of this text and Gianluca Buoncore for his attention in the graphic design of this book.

I thank Andrea Bertassi, who was the first (almost) American reader of this book, Federico Bilò who gave me courage in a critical moment, and Chiara Barzini who supported me in her own magical way.

I thank Nader Tehrani for introducing me to Gordon Goff and Federica Ewing, Kirby Anderson, Alejandro Guzman-Avila, and Jake Anderson at ORO Editions for believing in the project and for making sure it was accurately executed.

Finally, I would like to thank Anthony Vidler: his essays were formative for me and illuminated me on a method that I have been trying to adopt in my own research. His contribution to this book was thoughtful and sharp.

At last, I thank Lele, Gabri, Andrea, Leo, and Vanna.