BELOW THE SHADOWS

Postwar Europe served as the canvas for the aspirations of the Modern Movement to be realised on an unprecedented scale. To fight the housing shortage, each nation organized reconstruction plans amounting to tens of thousands of residential units per year, encouraging the production of modernist neighborhoods. The layout of the dwellings aligned with the principles disseminated by contemporary international examples, yielding the success of functionalist organizational principles. However, while the design of domestic spaces and building types grew more and more specialised, another field of architectural expertise did not enjoy the same success in those years. In opposition to perfectly working interiors, the design of the open spaces and the patches of landscape around the buildings remained a more ambiguous domain, with design categories, reference models, and ideal objectives being less clear. This text investigates three post-war Italian social housing case studies and how the Ina-Casa Plan's organicist and bottom-up culture could not build a consistent vocabulary for open space, leaving each project to deal with its landscape and ground conditions as an isolated problem.