Engineer, architect, builder, inventor, writer and university professor: he is Pier Luigi Nervi (Sondrio, 1891- Rome, 1979), a key figure in the economic miracle after the Second World War, defined by the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner as “the most brilliant modeler of reinforced concrete of our era”.
The Pier Luigi Nervi exhibition. Architecture as a challenge. Rome. Ingenuity and construction, which can be visited at the MAXXI (National Museum of 21st Century Arts) until 20 March, outlines, through a detailed and complex itinerary, the multifaceted figure of the engineer from Sondrio, who lives in the eternal city, has his studio, the headquarters of his company, teaches and builds professional and scientific relationships. It is a traveling exhibition of which Rome is the third stage, after the inaugural one in Brussels in June and Venice in August; in April the exhibition will move to Turin and then to the main European and American cities, offering different cuts and contents. In fact, the project was born with the intention of illustrating Nervi’s activity, placing emphasis from time to time on what was carried out in the host country or city, thus enriching the research with new materials, studies and testimonies. The Roman exhibition dedicates an exclusive focus to the works created for the Rome Olympics in 1960, the fiftieth anniversary of which is celebrated this year: the Palazzetto dello Sport, the Flaminio stadium, the Palazzo dello Sport at EUR and the Corso Francia viaduct , original structures created by Nervi not only as a designer, but also as a builder. In this sense, the MAXXI presents itself as the ideal venue, as it not only allows a physical comparison with three of his best-known works, which are located in its immediate vicinity (the Palazzetto, the Stadium and the viaduct), ideally opening the museum to the city, but allows direct knowledge of a part of the documents coming from the Pier Luigi Nervi archive fund, material recently merged largely into the museum archives and currently being catalogued.
Structural invention can only be the result of a harmonious fusion of personal inventive intuition and impersonal, realistic, inviolable static science.
The exhibition is introduced outside the museum by the Giuseppa, the family’s ferrocement motorboat, recently restored and painted today only on one side to highlight the original construction material. What welcomes the visitor inside the museum are the images of Mario Carrieri, who, with a photographic campaign created specifically for the exhibition, interpreted some of Nervi’s most famous creations: photographic prints in cardboard on aluminum suspended in mid-air, which in a suggestive way slowly reveal themselves as they retrace the curvilinear wall of the museum structure. The itinerary then unfolds presenting 15 of his main projects (among others we remember the Stadio Comunale in Florence, the Palazzo delle Esposizioni and the Palazzo del Lavoro in Turin, the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris, the Torre della Borsa in Montreal, the Audience Hall in the Vatican, St. Mary’s Cathedral in San Francisco and the Risorgimento Bridge in Verona), each introduced by exhaustive educational panels. Projects, models, original drawings, period photos, interviews, films, correspondence and other archive material alternate (for example, the original documents of over 40 registered patents), all marked from above by large roundels where they are Nervian circular roofs are projected, virtual domes with optical effects. A path that flows into the most scenic part of the exhibition, namely the section dedicated to Olympic architecture. The exhibition becomes circular, perhaps re-proposing the very structures of the sports halls designed by Nervi in those years, and the visitor finds himself isolated from the rest and physically introduced inside the creations of 1960: looking up a set of period photographs take us back to those years, while a 1:25 scale model toy reproduces the Sports Hall, an example of the application of the so-called “Nervi System”, which contains a set of technical solutions that define a new way of building, cheap and quick. On the other hand, “architecture – states the engineer in one of his university lectures – is not drawing; it is a constructive process and a final result”.
