Myron Goldsmith e lʼItalia (1953-1955)

Based on archival research on the Myron Goldsmith fund at the CCA (Canadian Centre for Architecture), the essay explores the formative experience of the American architect and engineer in Italy from 1953 to 1955. It is the first scientific survey on this topic, one which sheds light on this fundamental encounter between Goldsmith and the Italian engineering culture of the 1950s. While studying at the University of La Sapienza, he attended the lectures of Pier Luigi Nervi, participated in the competition for one of the most important facilities at the 1960 Rome Olympics (the Velodrome), travelled across Italy and Europe, and met several figures exceptionally significant for Italian engineering (Chelazzi, Gori, Musmeci, Morandi) and architectural culture of the 1950s. The archival records regarding Goldsmith’s stay in Italy represent an important document which enables understanding to what extent the American architect was actually involved in the Italian context, and the importance of the cultural exchanges and collaborations that he developed during his time in Italy. It is also useful to see what Italy represented to the international audience in those years (or the American one, at least), in terms of structural architecture. Nervi represented, together with Mies, the central figure for the expressiveness of structure, where architecture, engineering, and aesthetics work together to generate the complex practice of the art of building. This research, which was at the same time formal and theoretical, was remarked on by Goldsmith, who in a letter to Mies declared that: “Such theoretical work can be better done in Italy, indeed in Rome itself, it seems to me, than anywhere else in the world.”