Between New Empiricism and Neorealism

BETWEEN NEW EMPIRICISM AND NEOREALISM In the June issue of 1958 of Bruno Zevi’s magazine L’architettura cronache e storia Fabrizio Cocchia published a long article on the English born and educated architect Ralph Erskine. This publication represented an early opportunity for the Italian architectural community to get acquainted with Erskine’s work. The architect, who was then in his forties, had settled in Sweden (his adoptive country) for many years and already built several villas and workers’ housing neighborhoods that deserved wider attention. It is worth asking why Zevi, who was an intentionally reception-conscious editor when selecting themes and related photographs to be published in his magazine, had chosen to document Erskine’s buildings. The answer is implicitly related to the ideological framework of Erskine’s works, closely echoing Zevi’s critique to the dogmatic modern movement of the masters. Erskine’s buildings aimed at “bringing flexibility and human touch into the prisms of cubism.” Another thought to be considered is meaningfully related to the impact of the concept of the Swedish “New Empiricism” in the design of housing neighborhoods for working class families after WWII. This issue has been the focus of recent reassessments, which have analyzed the conclusions of the later CIAMs and the experimental programs under debate by the Team 10. More specifically Zevi saw Erskine as an original interpreter of that romantic movement, whose blossoming was in tune with the building of the welfare state, and a humanistic attitude in architecture to match with. In addition, soon after the end of WWII the concept of “New Empiricism” related to both the physical and social building of the communities had generated an interesting debate in England through the writings of Nikolaus Pevsner and J.M. Richards in The Architectural Review. Quite soon that debate widely reverberated through continental Europe, more effectively in countries, such as Italy, where reconstruction after the heavily war destructions was an urgent need. As a matter of fact the dwelling communities designed by Erskine are fully respectful of everyone’s privacy as well as deeply concerned with the meaning of collective life. He was regarded as a banner of that European way to organic architecture that Zevi had introduced to serve the program of the post WWII reconstruction. It is no coincidence that in 1965 Stefano Ray, one of Zevi’s most talented pupils, published a well documented survey on modern architecture in Scandinavian countries. Ray’s introduction began quoting The Architectural Review and praising New Empiricism for challenging the principles of functionalism, aiming to create an aesthetic of the everyday life and introducing key concepts like humanism, spontaneity, and psychology. Almost at the end of the 1970s Erskine, Zevi and Ray meet again. In the book series “Universale di architettura”, edited by Zevi, Ray wrote a small but significant booklet Ralph Erskine: architetture di bricolage e partecipazione. The title captures the spirit of Erskine’s approach to architecture. He is the modern homo faber of the twentieth century; his work rejects any pre-conceived language; his practice is based on the multiplicity of the circumstances human beings live in and the architect is requested to serve. Being an apostle of participation, Erskine has opened the path to a constructive model that is regaining full credentials in our globalized world.