materia e memoria: l'uso delle macerie e delle rovine nella Germania del secondo dopoguerra

Materials and memory: the use of the ruins and rubble in the post war Germany. In post-war Germany, reconstruction has entrusted ruins, rubble and recycled materials with an essential role: they define the meaning of the intervention, the memories we want transmit through it, the sense of architectural solutions. Cases and approaches are very numerous and very different from each other. In this broad framework, the paper focuses on Rudolf Schwarz, an original voice of Modern, and reconsiders the work of Emil Steffann, a more traditional church builder, whose activity, however, does not lack inconsistencies. Both architects are linked by the common experience in the reconstruction of Lorraine between 1941 and 1945, and their post-war work is concentrated in Rhineland, the center of the new Federal Republic. Natural disasters and wars give today to these experiences a dramatic relevance, but they should not be proposed as models for a gloomy revival, they are rather concrete cases of a more general principle: the materials were entrusted with the function of transmitting the memory. Has this purpose succeeded and, seventy, eighty years after, we do it still understand? Which solutions were used, and among these, which seem the most effective? Such questions can help to find contemporary interpretations.