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III
NERVI’S contributions are particularly impressive measured against the background of his education and his times. His professional training—he was graduated from the Civil Engineering School of Bologna in 1913—was in the formal “art versus science” tradition of the day. His future role, as a man who was to question these ideals, find them unrealistic and denounce them for an entirely new concept of building is all the more remarkable in view of his solid indoctrination in the Victorian architectural philosophy already described. “When I studied at the excellent Civil Engineering School at Bologna, the word architecture referred only to the study of facades and of their details. It never occurred to our professors, or even to us, that a bridge, a carrying structure, an urban plan, could also be works of architecture....Structures in reinforced concrete or iron, in spite of already existing examples of great bridges, of the Eiffel tower, were considered technical feats developed in fields that had nothing to do with architecture....I remember many examples seen during that period—at exhibitions of the new architecture—a church project, for example, with a pronaos [portico] held up by pilasters so tall and thin that it would have been absolutely impossible to have executed it even in welded steel....” These designs were more concerned with the look of a building than how it was put together, an approach based on a false formalism that emphasized “the division between substance and appearance...the mentality of the decorator, to which everything is possible in the field of mouldings and plastic and pictorial decoration...ignorance of the physical entity of architecture, which, like a living being, cannot separate beauty from the physiological health of the body.”{14}
At the same time that academic dogma clung to these outmoded ideals, they were being shattered by contemporary practice. Nervi relates, in Costruire Correttamente, how his professor of structure (one of the few theoreticians aware of the limitations of the theories he taught) read letters of German engineers who predicted, on the basis of mathematical calculations, that Hennebique’s Risorgimento Bridge in Rome, built in 1913, could not possibly stand although it was already completed and in use. This important construction, and other trendsetting achievements of the same years, were ignored by the schools and the architectural profession. Although Nervi stated that he was not aware of much of the pioneering work then in process until many years later, reinforced concrete had come into its full majority in the first decade of the new century. Hennebique’s exceptional talent as a businessman and promoter, in addition to his outstanding abilities as an engineer, resulted in widespread publicity and universal use for the new material. As early as 1903, Auguste Perret had established concrete architecturally in his famous Paris apartment house at 25 his Rue Franklin, a landmark of the modern movement notable for its cantilevered construction and exposed concrete frame. By 1907, the Queen Alexandria Sanatorium had been built in Davos, Switzerland, by architects Pfleghard and Haefeli, with the engineer, Robert Maillart, collaborating. Maillart’s slim, economical concrete bridges crossed Switzerland’s lesser-known valleys as early as 1900; his shallow, curved-slab Tavanasa span of 1905 set the standard of unsurpassed efficiency and artistry that was to distinguish his bridge designs through the 1930’s. In 1910, his Zurich warehouse introduced the beamless mushroom ceiling to European design. Tony Garnier began his “grand travaux” for the city of Lyons in 1909, based on a highly original scheme of 1901–04 for a Cité Industrielle of reinforced concrete. In America, Ernest Ransome had constructed sizable reinforced concrete plants for the United Shoe Machinery Company in Beverly, Massachusetts in 1903-04, and the Foster-Armstrong Piano Company at Rochester, New York in 1904-05;{15} followed immediately by Albert Kahn’s better known factories for the automobile industry. Reinforced concrete was in great demand for industrial and commercial building of all sor...
