Pier Luigi Nervi. the dome as manifesto of art and science

Pier Luigi Nervi has certainly oriented his interest to the essential value of art that at the same time need to be added to the essential value of science. If we look at Nervi’s essay "Is building an art or science?" written in 1945, we can find this continuous necessity to find out the rules that links together nature and technique, arts and science. For sure it’s now a much abused item, but we need to think that in the first half of the XX century this was not so common. Pier Luigi Nervi was also part of A.P.A.O. Association for organic architecture, that has structured a school with a pedagogical program interested in teaching how to look at architecture. Nervi was in charge for statics and structural design course, this was one of the most imaginative courses, where structures were described as a “science of construction without calculation” where he encouraged the reading of structural behaviour in a way that has to be considered at the same way of behaviour in natural forces. The school, that ended in 1947 offered a new way of thinking architecture, with a new idea of aesthetic in building, against the monumentality of the fascist period and interested in a challenge in tecnique, tecnology, matherials and arts in a positive collaboration between differents disciplines. Pier Luigi Nervi, Luigi Piccinato, Mario Ridolfi, Aldo della Rocca, and Bruno Zevi, were part of the school and later, with Mario Fagioli, Carlo Cestelli-Guidi, Angelo Ridolfi, and Enrico Tedeschi, they will also work on the Manuale dell’architetto, a guide to standardized construction techniques and representation that served as a common reference for Italian architects and engineers. In Nervi there was the idea of standardisation and technical knowledge, linked with an historical backgroung that has helped him founding every time right structural solutions trasformed with the help of imagination. If we look at his buildings we can see a fight against formalism, they are peculiarly modern in the the way that they show the great influence exerted by the awareness of history, displaying at the same time the indications for creating new shapes in structures. This was also the main topic in all the theorical essays written by Nervi along his career.