The Italian government has begun a serious effort to raise the standard of good design. The country's first Architecture Festival was held last November with the aim of opening a dialogue between the public and state institutions, and of reviving both affection for architecture and the political weight of architecture in Europe. In every large and small Italian city the local branches of the National Council of Architects organised meetings and exhibitions on topics from “architecture in cinema” to “the restoration of historic buildings.” Other activities included: the identification of historic monuments; educational programmes for children; the lighting of public spaces and important buildings; and the display of titles in bookshop windows.
To disseminate the heritage of modern architecture, municipalities also placed plaques on valuable twentieth-century buildings, such as Giuseppe Vaccaro's post office in Naples and Adalberto Libera's Villa Malaparte. In the run-up to the festival a set of such activities was held in Assisi, close to the epicentre of last year's severe earthquake. The architecture prize was awarded to Ignazio Gardella, a senior elder of architecture best known for the tuberculosis sanatorium in Alessandria built in 1933.
The following day, during Europe's first conference on architectural policy, the newly appointed Italian Minister of Culture, Giovanna Melandri, continued the course of her predecessor Walter Veltroni by reaffirming her commitment to preparing new laws on architecture. The critic and historian Bruno Zevi said that passing such laws was essential if architecture was to be rescued from the humiliating condition in which it now finds itself.
Melandri counted architecture as a public need and recommended that the new laws entrust the supervision of building activity to the architect. That shift would bring a fundamental change to the current state of affairs, in which the professional roles of architects, engineers and surveyors are in tension and overlap.
Source: Architectural Record, 01/1999.
