Prefabrication in Italy after World War II: Zanuso versus Camus

The paper intends to investigate, within Italian architectural production from the end of World War II down to the sixties, the meaning given to the term "prefabrication" and "industrialization" in the construction industry. Italy, unlike other European countries, never opted decisively and in a widespread way for this type of approach. However, it did develop its own response to this issue, on an occasional basis, in the period between the wars and in a broader and more highly articulated way in the 1950s and 60s. The issue of the rationalization of building production, arising out of obvious economic and productive requirements, became central in the immediate postwar period, especially since it was seen as a possible solution to the housing shortage, made even more urgent by wartime destruction. The proof of the real interest felt is shown by the presence of numerous exhibitions, conferences, journals and features in specialized architectural reviews, but above all by the birth of organizations such as the AIP (Associazione italiana prefabbricazione) and CRAPER (Centro per la ricerca applicata ai problemi dell’edilizia residenziale). As awareness spread of the Italy’s backwardness compared to other European countries, in the northern Italy there was a willingness to pick up on the echo of experiments in the rest of Europe, especially Britain and France. A central moment was the Italian experimental program, small in scale, but extremely significant for the cultural and architectural context, begun by the Milan Triennale, which initiated the construction of a housing complex, QT8, where new solutions could be studied with the aim of developing building systems from an artisanal to an industrial stage. In the early sixties, to meet the real need for housing, the idea was consolidated of making use of prefabrication, even if the country's economic policy had prevented it from developing beyond the experimental phase of the systems tested between 1947 and 1951 in Milan. Thinking was moving in the direction of "heavy" prefabrication, in which France appeared to represent the state of the art in Europe. An important step, which marked a turning point in Italy, was the import of French patents for the construction of new residential districts. The first noptable outcome of this work was the five-year program of the IACP (Istituto Autonomo Case Popolari) in Milan. Extremely significant for urban, architectural and constructional solutions was the Gratosoglio development to the south of Milan (with over 3570 home units), designed by BBPR and built between 1963 and 1969 using the Camus system. If housing output in Italy opted for systems that were already tried and tested elsewhere, research and experimentation continued thanks to the thinking about design by architects/industrial designers, who made this theme central to their architectural production. In particular, Marco Zanuso concentrated on the design of industrial complexes for the Olivetti company in Italy (Ivrea, Crema, Marcianise) and South America (Merlo in Argentina and Guarulhos in Brazil), creating solutions highly relevant to this architectural sector.