Restoring the Modern

Written by  Carlo Bassi
Reviving an icon of Twentieth century architecture: Tresigallo.
The history of the Fascist new towns begins with the Agro Pontino around Rome, when the great project to reclaim the marshes was launched.
The idea of this project, and the steady progress it made, struck international public opinion as an extraordinary display of wisdom and ability. The town of Littoria (now Latina) was born, followed by Sabaudia, Pomezia, Aprilia and Pontinia.

Political and social reasons were obviously to the fore. But what of the architecture?
Modest in Littoria, but highly accomplished in Sabaudia, the planning of which was awarded by competition to architects such as Piccinato and Montuori, names which are well-known in the history of twentieth century Italian architecture.
And in the wake of this great adventure (which continued with Carbonia, Arsia and Torviscosa - new towns founded as part of the drive for economic self-sufficiency) Edmondo Rossoni, the fascist Agriculture minister, invented Tresigallo, the major reclamation area surrounding Ferrara.

Tresigallo was a modest rural town on the western outskirts of the reclaimed land, standing directly between Ferrara and the sea. Rossoni, who was born in the area, wanted to expand service industries in the district, making it a centre with public facilities and setting up industrial activities consistent with the policy of autarchy.
During the years 1936-1937, side by side with an urban development with highly representative purposes, industrial plants sprang up which were noteworthy for their size and technological nature around the central urban core.
Rossoni planned everything by letter, because he and he alone decided what would be done and how, entrusting the execution of the works to the engineer Frighi. This self-referential approach is one of the reasons why Tresigallo did not - and still does not - feature in the list of the regime's prestigious projects in those years.

Seventy years on, it is time to launch a practical discussion of its total and rigorous preservation against (somewhat) insidious attempts to subvert and distort it.
A careful and targeted cultural investigation is needed, to re-examine the events surrounding its foundation, reconsider its architectural forms (we can see a consistent pattern in the towers which rise from public buildings, the long porticos in the square which recall the mysterious ambience of De Chirico's metaphysics, the use the layout of the buildings and gateways to bring atmosphere to streets and places, the high-quality design of the long, rigorously modest enclosures surrounding industrial areas) and plan a meticulous programme of restoration and conservation.

But what kind of restoration and conservation? This touches on a painful and controversial aspect of cultural events in Tresigallo. In distant years the newly founded school of architecture in Ferrara put forward a major plan. This plan entailed establishing a section of the Restoration department in Tresigallo, using it as the basis for advancing the study of "restoration OF the modern".
Nothing was done, but the inspiration and the underlying idea of this project still seems relevant. Where better than Tresigallo to act as a benchmark site for these new and vital developments in the concept of restoration?

Here what we have is not a single building in need of restoration, but an entire urban complex, and the techniques for restoring ancient buildings which are currently studied at the Faculty are certainly not the most appropriate for this architecture whose intrinsic fragility means that they require very specific treatment in order to preserve them properly.

Tresigallo would be an ideal laboratory for studying many aspects of Modern restoration and for testing its effectiveness and contradictions. This is a new science, and the possibilities and techniques need to be investigated to avoid creating a museum, as though the buildings we want to restore had not passed through years of life and transformation.

Marieke Kuipers, a Dutch academic working in this field, puts it like this: «The result always depends above all on the owners: only dedicated heirs, whether private individuals or the local authority, can bring a modern monument back to life. They need trusted architects to restore these buildings in an appropriate fashion, architects who are able to juggle the difficult relationship between the ethics, theory and practice of conservation.» Let us remember that only "dedicated heirs" can face up to these problems. Especially at Tresigallo.