(Mega)Structures' resilience. Italian motorway bridge-restaurants between global/local modernism

Infrastructure items are distinguishing elements of 20th-Century architecture and urban planning. In this field, Italian motorway construction-sites became a stimulating workshop for architectural and engineering experimentation: between 1959 and 1972, fifteen bridge-restaurants were designed by Angelo Bianchetti, Carlo Casati, Alfonso Stocchetti, Melchiorre Bega and Pier Luigi Nervi to meet the needs of new kinds of services for new forms of mobility, as a result of the modernisation of the country. Built to be accessible from each side of the motorway in order to reduce management costs, bridge-restaurants were conceived with two lateral buildings and an overhead structure with a curtain wall or concrete façade. These interesting buildings are part of the continuously expanding concept of Modern Italian cultural heritage. This paper aims to analyse why these buildings are resilient by making a critical comparison between the American and the Italian cases. The research examines how such megastructures adapt themselves to the local contexts and cultures, beginning with their construction. Italian local modernism derives from structural and expressive research concerning steel and concrete megastructures but also from Italian design and advertising architecture. Finally, the study deals with how these buildings preserve their identity, both intangible and tangible, despite the many interventions carried out to modernise service areas. These interventions are the expression of different transformative approaches connected to the local cultures.