Against the Contingencies of the Italian Society: Issues of Historical Continuity and Discontinuity in Italy’s Postwar Architectural Periodicals

Between 1945 and the end of the 1960s, Italian architectural journals witnessed the transformation of a country that, after the defeat in an ill-advised war, passed from being an agricultural nation of limited industrial capacity to one of Europe’s economic powers. They also observed the way the professional culture struggled to adapt to the ongoing change by redefining its working methodologies as well as its identity. Moving from cheaply produced and politically engaged publishing endeavors to graphically rich and intellectually sophisticated magazines, architectural periodicals testified to the passage from an economy marked by scarcity to one based on increasing material and cultural consumptions. The efforts to adjust to the times led to mixed results, however. Confronting unsettled questions on the relation between past, present, and future, journals such as Metron in the 1940s, Casabella in the 1950s and 1960s, or Controspazio at the threshold of the 1970s devised diverse responses to the events that marked Italy’s history.