Gino Valle. La professione come sperimentazione continua / The Profession as Continous Experimentation

This volume is one of the results of the international research project coordinated by Franz Graf and Francesca Albani in collaboration with the Archivio Studio Valle Architetti Associati with the purpose of offering a thematic reinterpretation of Gino Valle’s achievement between the 1950s and early 1980s. The project has involved PhD researchers, professors and students from the Mendrisio Academy of Architecture of the Università della Svizzera italiana working on this project, which in various ways has made it possible to explore certain specific topics.1 The intense output of Gino Valle, an architect born in Udine in 1923, has been extensively studied in monographs by Pierre Alain Croset and Luca Skansi,2 who have already brought out its complexity and contradictions. This work seeks to reveal nuances that have so far remained undetected in previous studies concerning the collective aspect of Studio Valle’s output and its deep roots in the society of the second half of the twentieth century. Studio Valle was (and still is) a fluid practice, constantly evolving. Perhaps the most correct term would be “Studi Valle”, as over time there have been several groups of partners and colleagues who have responded within the design and construction process to the requests of different clients, both private and public. This new point of view has opened up interesting reflections on the variety, the “absence of stylistic links and ‘coherence’ between the works”,3 which have broadly characterised the understanding of Gino Valle’s work. Certainly, as previous studies have pointed out, this richness corresponds to an explicit desire for experimentation beyond the purpose of creating specific links and paths of research between the different works, but probably the dynamics of this variety are more complex. The collective work, together with the stimuli coming from its various social, geographical, cultural and economic contexts, has helped to define this at times contradictory and elusive multiplicity.