Architecture as a Living Act

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This text is the revised version of the essay La nostra città è tutta la terra. Leonardo Ricci architetto (1918-1994), with won the author the Enrico Guidoni Prize in 2019, published in Italian by Steinhäuser Verlag, Wuppertal 2021 (open access only).

Text by Maria Clara Ghia Translation by Tris Bruce Book Design by Gianluca Buoncore ORO Associate Editor: Kirby Anderson 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 First Edition ISBN: 978-1-935935-50-6 Color Separations and Printing: ORO Group Ltd. Printed in China.

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table of contents

Foreword Absence from History Anthony Vidler

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Introduction

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PART ONE 1

Florence in the years of the reconstruction

1.1

“A condition with no rest from absolute striving”

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1.2

The Florentine school and Giovanni Michelucci

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1.3

The “two Leonardis”: Ricci and Savioli

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1.4

The competitions for the reconstruction of the bridges in Florence (1945–48)

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1.5

The flower market of Pescia (1949–51)

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2

Until the early fifties

2.1

The first community buildings: Agàpe at Prali (1946–51)

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2.2

The Parisian years: Ricci the painter and existentialism

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2.3

Ricci’s home-studio and the experience of Monterinaldi (1949–63)

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3

The houses

3.1

An inevitable comparison: Frank Lloyd Wright

89

3.2

The “theoretical house” as a model

93

3.3

New ways to live: prestigious clients and further experiments

101

appendix

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INTERLUDE 4

Anonymous (20th Century)

4.1

The philosophical context: existentialism and phenomenology

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4.2

The myth and the absurd

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4.3

It is enough to exist

157

4.4

The architect: the last humanist

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4.5

There is a whole new world opening up

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ARCHITECTURE AS A LIVING ACT. Leonardo Ricci Maria Clara Ghia

PART TWO The Sicilian experience

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5.1 Riesi ou la force de l’Agàpe

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5.2 The Monte degli Ulivi community-village (1962–68)

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Fragments: from the exhibition to the macrostructure

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6.1 The turning point in the sixties

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6.2 Exhibits: between architecture and sculpture

185

6.3 Other living and working spaces

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6.4 The residential complex for the Sorgane district, Florence (1962–66)

215

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Visions: from the Earth-City to the real city

7.1

Projects for “non-alienated” men

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7.2 The seventies and eighties: competitive tenders and the last constructions

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7.3 An “archeology of forms”: the city of the dead and the city of justice

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appendix

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Afterwords Orazio Carpenzano, Antonella Greco

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Biography: Leonardo Ricci

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Bibliography

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Figure credits and List of abbreviations

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Acknowledgments

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And often he who has chosen the fate of the artist because he felt himself to be different soon realizes that he can maintain neither his art nor his difference unless he admits that he is like the others.

The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from.

Albert Camus

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ARCHITECTURE AS A LIVING ACT. Leonardo Ricci Maria Clara Ghia

1 Florence in the years of the reconstruction

My architecture has always been born from unhappiness.

From the desperation of living in a world that I don't like, but as far as I can, with my limited powers, I want to give a small contribution to its life.

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Leonardo Ricci to Giovanni Michelucci, December 23, 1987.

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Florence in the years following the Second World War was a very dynamic place socially and politically as well as culturally. Giorgio La Pira became the mayor in 1951, and he was soon dubbed “the holy mayor,” due to his adherence to a form of Christian materialism that upheld the primacy of society over politics and even the law. After his years spent in hiding during the war, La Pira had returned to the city in 1945. He was elected a member of the Italian Constituent Assembly in 1946 and he contributed to the formulation of Article 2 of the Italian Constitution, which specified the inviolable rights of man and the mandatory duties of political, economic, and social solidarity.

A group of intellectuals who since 1929 had gravitated around the magazine Frontespizio, published by Vallecchi Editor until 1940, had a prominent role in Florentine cultural debate. They included Piero Bargellini, Giovanni Papini, and Ardengo Soffici, who had been close collaborators ever since the times of the futurist magazine Lacerba. Then there was Father Ernesto Balducci;5 Don Lorenzo Milani; Carlo Bo; the poet, writer and translator Cristina Campo, the so-called “hermit of worldly grace,”6 and the hermetic poets Oreste Macrì, Leone Traverso, and Mario Luzi, who described Florence as the city of “life that is faithful to life.”7 In 1938 Carlo Bo published the essay Letteratura come vita (Literature as life), which effectively describes the climate of existential commitment that would animate the generation of intellectuals and artists also in the years following the war:

4 Bo, Carlo. “Letteratura come vita.”

Il Frontespizio (X, 1938): 560.

Florence in the year of reconstruction “A condition with no rest from absolute striving

1.1 “A condition with no rest from absolute striving”4

5 Ernesto Balducci and Giorgio La Pira, founded the

“Cenacolo” movement in Florence for promoting social solidarity and world peace. Balducci, La Pira and their entourage are considered eccentric figures in the context of Roman Catholicism. See also Greco, Antonella. “Tre ville di Leonardo Ricci, tra il dopoguerra e il boom.” In Leonardo Ricci: Monterinaldi/Balmain/Mann Borgese, edited by Greco Antonella, Ghia Maria Clara, 9. Rome: Palombi, 2012.

6 Citati, Pietro. Ritratti di donne, Milan: Rizzoli, 1992,

287–291.

7 See Luzi, Mario. Su fondamenti invisibili. Milan:

Rizzoli, 1971.

At this point it is clear that ... an opposition between literature and life cannot exist. For us they are both, in equal measure, instruments of research and therefore of truth: a means to attain the absolute need to know something about ourselves ... If there is a work worthy of man and if there is a chance for deliverance, it is this condition of attention, contemplation, and conscious loving regard for oneself ... finally it will be better to add that [literature] requires extraordinary rigor and presence, a fidelity that for us is measured with the awareness of death. Authority is directly related

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ARCHITECTURE AS A LIVING ACT. Leonardo Ricci Maria Clara Ghia

12 Pagano, Giuseppe. Letter to Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, Milan, July 20, 1942, then in Ragghianti, Carlo Ludovico. “Ricordo di Pagano,” Metron (44, 1952): 16.

13 Ragghianti, Carlo Ludovico. Letter to Bruno Zevi, Florence, September 15, 1950 (Rome, Fondazione Bruno Zevi archive, f. 03, c. 12).

that passion which considers urban planning as the social art par excellence ... not just the interplay of scenographies, shapes and tones, but an architectonic expression of the social and organizational problems of modern life, the synthesis of a vision of civilization that affects all the values of a culture.12

14 On the occasion of the exhibition of contempo-

rary Japanese architecture in the church-museum of Orsanmichele, curated by Giuseppe Gori, Paolo Riani and Giuliano Maggiora.

15 Ragghianti, Carlo Ludovico. “Architettura liberatrice.”

Critica d’arte (105, 1969): 25.

In September 1950, Ragghianti sent Pagano’s letter to Bruno Zevi in R ​​ ome, while Zevi was completing his Storia dell’ architettura moderna (History of Modern Architecture), the first manual of the history of twentieth century architecture to be published in Italy—a book that, together with his previous volume Verso un’architettura organica (Towards an Organic Architecture) of 1945, brought Frank Lloyd Wright’s message of democratic architecture to the country.

Pagano had died in the concentration camp of Mauthausen but the themes of his letter were still very relevant after the war, and Ragghianti wrote these words in his accompanying letter to Zevi: I am sending it to you with a clear purpose: to remind us that Pagano is right, and that therefore it is good to avoid collaborating too closely with the people who provoked his justified protest, and would provoke it today, if he were still alive ... For over twenty years he (in addition to myself ) waged a battle, which was an ideal refutation of the mental insufficiency of the academic and official milieus, consisting in a polemic disdain of the practical consequences of that mentality, due to its being identical with the executive power of the state.13 Ragghianti’s heartfelt words in this letter express his sense of his duty to act, fueled by a fundamental ethical imperative: “I cannot have illusions, I cannot have faith, I cannot have myths. I am bound to a ruthless clarity to see and think, and to act consequently.” In Architettura liberatrice (Architecture that Liberates), an article published in “Critica d’arte” in 1969,14 Ragghianti wrote: I think of the architect as a personality who, as Bergson said, realizes “the greatest possible amount of indetermination,” which is to say of choice and initiative, in concretizing forms that are conditions of existence ... But can there be a negative and destructive conscience in a man of culture, in his role as an architect? Wouldn’t that be in total contradiction to his very condition and will as a builder? His diagnosis of the society of wellbeing, or consumer society, will have to be mediated by his conception of man and of human coexistence, in order to maintain or to introduce into it the values ​​inherent in this conception. The terms of community life dictate to the architect the nature of his intervention: a termite-like or individual dwelling, integration with nature, the relationship between places of work and of rest, the use of free time, individual and collective education.15

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Florence in the year of reconstruction “A condition with no rest from absolute striving

The perceptiveness of Ragghianti’s critical reflections, as expressed through his journals, books, and exhibitions, must have been extraordinarily formative for the young Leonardo Ricci.

Starting in the fifties Ragghianti organized a series of important architecture exhibitions in Florence at Palazzo Strozzi: that of Frank Lloyd Wright in 1951, curated with Zevi, that of Le Corbusier in 1963, and that of Alvar Aalto in 1966.

Ragghianti and Leonardo Ricci were in frequent contact in those years

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Florence in the year of reconstruction The “two Leonardis”: Ricci and Savioli

1.3 The “two Leonardis”: Ricci and Savioli

Leonardo Ricci and Leonardo Savioli were Giovanni Michelucci’s favorite students, but they had very differing temperaments, as Ricci was impulsive and extroverted, while Savioli was reserved and silent. Affectionately dubbed “the two Leonardis” by their fellow students, they would become the “hard core” of the Florentine school of architecture after the war.

Before and during the war Savioli drew corpses in the anatomical dissecting room while, at the same time, Ricci was drawing mannequins posed as if they were dead bodies. They were clearly both asking similar questions from different points of view, reflecting on the theme of death as the measure of all human actions, and examining the primary functions that give life to a body.

Savioli wrote: If … we presume to act before knowing the meaning of our actions, it is evident that they will have nothing to do with life itself. It is a question of rediscovering our own roots before being able to say whether the city will be constructed vertically or horizontally like a ribbon, as a garden city of three million or twenty thousand inhabitants.31 From the beginning they used their own individual approaches ​​to elaborate ideas for new kinds of architecture: for Ricci it was painting, while for Savioli it was the graphic arts. They made studies of textures, grains, weaves, and read within them the signs and indications for ​​possible architectural and urban structures.

The human body is investigated almost as if it were a landscape, the different parts of which are the constitutive elements of a city.32 In particular, Ricci focused on figurative themes drawn from ancestral myths, with symbolic figures engaged in ritual dances, embraces, struggles, births, and deaths. Ricci was inspired by abstractionism and then primitivism: Picasso, Schiele, Giacometti and Ernst, until he too abandoned himself to an explosive gesturalism, in the wake of the latest pictorial developments in North America and Europe, and following his discovery of existentialist thought.33 Giulio Carlo Argan was particularly struck by a nascent urban planning methodology in Savioli’s graphic and pictorial work that seemed to be based on:

31 Savioli, Leonardo. “Per un significato più vero della pianificazione” (For a truer meaning of planning).

Architetti (2, 1950): 21.

32 See Paolini, Claudio; Tolu, Eleonora (edited

by). “Registrare l’esistenza”. La pittura e il disegno di Leonardo Savioli. Catalogue for the exhibition (Museum of Contemporary and Twentieth Century Art of Monsummano Terme, March 28–June 27, 2010). Florence: Edizioni Polistampa, 2010.

33 See Uzzani, Giovanna. “Pittura liberata e libera”

(Liberated and free painting). In Leonardo Ricci 100.

Scrittura, pittura architettura 100 note a margine dell’Anonimo del XX secolo, (Leonardo Ricci 100. Writing, painting architecture: 100 marginal notes in Anonymous), Catalogue for the exhibition at the refectory of Santa Maria Novella, Florence, April 12–May 26, 2019). Edited by Ghia, Maria Clara; Ricci, Clementina; Dattilo, Ugo, 27-32, Florence: Dida press, University of Florence, 2019.

ORO Editions 4 Leonardo Savioli, house on via Piagentina, Florence, 1964–65 (GB 2021)

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ARCHITECTURE AS A LIVING ACT. Leonardo Ricci Maria Clara Ghia

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Florence in the year of reconstruction The “two Leonardis”: Ricci and Savioli

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40 See p. 259 of this book.

9 Leonardo Ricci, La Torre (The Tower), Sorgane, Florence (AG 2021) 10 Leonardo Savioli, Building A, Sorgane, Florence (MCG 2011)

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shapes and their brutalist interlocking, as well as the possibility of infinite combinations of the housing units, are also important elements in Ricci’s work.

Another project that both architects were involved in was the extension of the cemetery at Montecatini Alto (near Pistoia in Tuscany) in 1967,40 although Savioli’s project was realized, while Ricci’s remained on paper. Savioli gave the main building a spatial arrangement like that of a vast underground church, to express a collective ritual of commemoration and the community’s reflection on the pain of loss.

Savioli’s buildings, like Ricci’s, were always planned for the community of individuals, and their shapes and spaces are governed by the needs of living together.

Despite the evident differences in their plastic and formal qualities, they share the features of being potentially modified over time in accordance with the needs of users, so as to provide them with the highest possible degree of freedom. The architect’s approach to the project is therefore necessarily different each time, so much so that it may even appear to conflict with what he had previously planned and implemented. This testifies to the self-critical attitude inspired by Michelucci, and the rejection of any a priori concepts and formalistic preconceptions that might be imposed upon the design at any scale, from that of the house to that of the city.

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Florence in the year of reconstruction TThe “two Leonardis”: Ricci and Savioli

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ARCHITECTURE AS A LIVING ACT. Leonardo Ricci Maria Clara Ghia

11 Leonardo Ricci, Giorgio Gori, Leonardo Brizzi, “Florence on the River” project, 1945 (BSTUV)

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Florence in the year of reconstruction The competitions for the reconstruction of the bridges in Florence (1945–1948)

1.4 The competitions for the reconstruction of the bridges in Florence (1945–1948)

As stated above, Michelucci did not participate directly in the competitive tenders for the reconstruction of the center of Florence after the war, but he assisted the two groups of his students who made proposals. The project by Edoardo Detti, Riccardo Gizdulich, Rolando Pagnini, and Danilo Santi was entitled “City on the River,” while that of Gori, Ricci, Savioli, and Brizzi was called “Florence on the River” and both of these projects were awarded prizes.41 In the end however, none of the proposals elaborated would be realized, and the municipal authorities opted for an intensive use of the areas concerned, in order to maximize income from the new constructions.

The theme of “City on the River”, was that of urban life on the Arno and the union of the two riverbanks, to be effected by creating gaps in the masonry embankments, so as to make room for new scenic views onto the water. The design for “Florence on the River” was based on a succession of solids and voids, consisting of buildings and open spaces, interspersed with pathways reconnecting the surviving monuments. The idea underlying these plans for the reconstruction of Florence was that of using the Arno as a linear element to be inhabited, and the backbone of a new urban layout from which future developments would branch off like its ribs. Ricci first began to investigate this conception in the projects he presented for the bridge reconstructions, and it would remain as a subliminal presence in his vision of urban planning in future years.

The most contentious project was certainly that of the reconstruction of the Ponte Santa Trinita. Almost a sculptural rather than an architectural work, it was built by Bartolomeo Ammannati from 1567 to 1570, on the basis of a design that several scholars, including Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, attributed to Michelangelo.42 Initially, Ragghianti opposed the idea of a faithful reconstruction “as it was and where it was,” claiming that it would be better to leave a void of regret, due to the impossibility of restoring such an irreplaceable work to the city, and he proposed rebuilding it in a completely modern way. But, after the fragments of the bridge were recovered from the riverbed, he changed his mind.

It now seemed possible to reuse the same materials, to restore the bridge almost exactly “as it was.” Thus the restoration was carried out, thanks to Gizdulich’s very accurate assessment and careful supervision.

41 See Cresti, Carlo. Firenze capitale mancata - Architet-

tura e città dal piano Poggi a oggi (Florence the failed capital - Architecture and the city from the Poggi plan to today). Milan: Electa, 1995. For the “Florence on the river” project and for Ricci’s work in collaboration with Gori see Fabbrizzi, Fabio. Giuseppe Giorgio Gori: opera completa.

Florence: Edifir, 2016.

42 The attribution of the design to Michelangelo

Buonarroti was supported by Kriegbaum, Friedrich. “Michelangelo e il ponte a S. Trinita” (Michelangelo and the bridge at S. Trinita). Rivista d’Arte (XXIII, 1941): 137–144 and by Ragghianti, Carlo Ludovico. Il Ponte a Santa Trinita.

Florence: Vallecchi, 1948.

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16 58 See Vinay, Tullio. L’amore è più grande. La storia di Agàpe e la nostra (Love is greater. The story of Agàpe and of us). Turin: Claudiana Editrice, 1995, 14.

59 The engineer Costantino Messina says that he had only been given a 1:200 scale plan before he arrived at the construction site, and the plans that Ricci drew up during the building work were always what he himself described as “approximate.” Messina adds that “more than once our discussions began with me saying ‘it’s impossible’ and they ended with ‘I’ll see what I can do!’ It was not so much due to his ability to persuade me as to the height and depth of his vision of the architectural work, to which one could not help but adapt oneself.” Quoted in Loik, Mirella et al., L’architettura di Leonardo Ricci: Agàpe e Riesi (The architecture of Leonardo Ricci: Agàpe and Riesi).

Turin: Claudiana Editrice, 2001, 44.

60 The “Logbooks” conserved in Ricci’s home-studio in

Monterinaldi, contain clippings of articles on the ecumenical center published in J.A. Lausanne (10, 1947); Kirkens Front (1948); Schweizer Illustrierte, (8, 1949); L’illustré.

Revue hebdomadaire suisse, (23, 1949); Time, the Weekly New Magazine (August 27, 1951) and several others.

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component and he wrote the words: “Here one either practices Agàpe or one dies” on the back of a photograph of the construction site. For Ricci, barely twenty‑eight years old at the time, Agàpe was a ray of light and of hope in a world devastated by war; a place for creating a different vision of humanity and a symbol of integration.58 He responded to his first important creative task by reducing the number of his plans and drawings to a bare minimum and actively participating in the work on the construction site. He now expressed his ideas in rather naïve simple sketches.59 Michelucci’s message can be discerned in this approach, with its mistrust in rigid plans or designs that can be restrictive or detrimental to real living requirements, which are constantly changing and evolving. Working directly on the building site clearly represents an attempt to adapt to the needs of the future inhabitants.

Ricci thus engaged in endless experimentation, during which he began to discover and express his own radically new approach to architecture, so much so that the construction process of the community was reported in many foreign magazines.60 Construction methods were empirical and artisanal, favoring the use of local materials. The stones were chosen, cut, and brought to the site by its future inhabitants, their colleagues, and their friends in a spontaneous and

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Until the early 1950s The first community buildings: Agàpe at Prali (1946–51)

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largely unplanned operation involving the collaboration of volunteers, students, and professionals from all over the world. The microcosm of the building site perfectly represented contemporary humanity:

61 This testimony by Ricci is quoted in Loik et al., L’ar-

chitettura di Leonardo Ricci (The architecture of Leonardo Ricci), cit., 91.

The attitude to the building site was basically the ideology of that historical period: in many workers it provoked a sort of fear of the definitive and the concluded, while what made the experience of working in the field so attractive was precisely the aspects of planning and design involved in the undertaking. Experiencing the challenge mattered more than realizing the plan. The fascination of the idea and the mixture of effort and satisfaction counted more than the final finished wall.61 Every distinction between sacred and profane between the separate areas was made as permeable as possible in the project, and the architectural ensemble, including the refectory, study room, chapel, and dormitories, was conceived as an open interconnected space. The whole complex was an organism that had grown naturally, not by the addition of distinct parts, in which the evangelical testimony could be an experience shared by everyone involved: the client, the

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16 - 17 Agàpe ecumenical center, Prali, Piedmont, 1948, perspective sketches (CSAC)

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Until the early 1950s The first community buildings: Agàpe at Prali (1946–51)

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41 General plan of the Village of Monterinaldi, Florence, 1957 (CSAC)

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Until the early 1950s Ricci’s home-studio and the experience of Monterinaldi (1949–63)

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