Biography
Pier Nervi was born in Sondrio, Lombardy in 1891. He began work as an engineer and contractor in 1923, after training as an engineer at Bologna University. In the 1940s he developed ideas for a reinforced concrete which allowed him to create structures of "strength, simplicity and grace". His services as an engineering consultant were highly sought as a result of his experimentation with structural concrete. Nervi believed that architecture and engineering were two connected parts of a whole. To produce good buildings, he felt that a knowledge of materials, nature and construction were essential to understanding architecture. His work as a theorist attracted a wide following.

Through his designs, Nervi successfully made reinforced concrete the main structural material of the day. He was awarded Gold Medals by the RIBA, the AIA and the Academi d'Architecture. In the years 1946-61 he was a professor of engineering at Rome University. Nervi died in Rome in 1979.

Dennis Sharp. The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Architects and Architecture. New York: Quatro Publishing, 1991. ISBN 0-8230-2539-X. NA40.I45. p113.

Exhibition Building, Turin
Architect Pier Luigi Nervi
Location Turin, Italy
Date 1948 to 1949

The Creator's Words

"...two of my most interesting projects, the hangars built of pre-cast elements and the roof for the Turin Exhibition Halls, would have been impossible without a simultaneous invention of the structural method. They would have looked completely different if they had been built on the same principle but in a conventional technique."

-Pier Luigi Nervi from the Introduction of Jürgen Joedicke. The Works of Pier Luigi Nervi. pVII.

Details

"The hall is rectangular and covers an area of 240 feet x 309 feet. On one of the two shorter sides is a semi-circular apse. Windows are arranged in the corrugation of the prefabricated roof elements."

"A semi-circular apse 132 feet in diameter adjoins the main hall which is 240 feet long. Its roof
consists of corrugated pre-cast units. The half-dome roof of the apse is also constructed with
prefabricated elements."

"The vaulted construction of the hall consists of prefabricated elements which spring from in situ
concrete abutments."

"The units are of Çferro-cementÈ and have a length of approximately 15 feet and a width of 8 feet 3 inches. The thickness of the curved precast parts is less than 2 inches. This small thickness is achieved only by the increased rigidity through the corrugation and the transverse webs at either end. The individual units are joined by in situ concrete."

-Jurgen Joedicke. The Works of Pier Luigi Nervi. p59-62.

Building Palazzo del Lavoro
Architect Pier Luigi Nervi
Location Turin, Italy
Date 1959 to 1961

Notes
Palace of Labor. Internally supported on radial branches from huge central columns. Italia'61 Exhibition.

Discussion

"The Palace of Labour designed and built by Nervi and his son Antonio for the Turin exhibition of 1961 was the result of a competition held in 1959. The building-containing 85,000 square feet of exhibition space-had to be capable of conversion to a technical school at the end of the exhibition. It was erected in less than eighteen months. Like Mies van der Rohe's buildings, there is a subtle fusion of structure and space in Nervi's buildings. But whereas Mies searched for free internal space, Nervi's aesthetic is dependent on an energetic exhibition of the structural parts of a building. The Palace of Labour was no exception... the simple 525 feet square shape was divided into sixteen structurally separate steel roofed compartments each supported on 65-foot-high concrete stems. The external walls, entirely clad in glass, wrapped round the perimeter of the building and incorporated large 70-foot-high vertical mullions."

-Dennis Sharp. Twentieth Century Architecture: a Visual History. p245.

Building Paper Mill at Mantua
Architect Pier Luigi Nervi
Location Mantua, Italy
Date 1961 to 1962

Discussion
"The structure, which covers an area of 86,000 sq.ft., is designed to contain large modern machinery for the manufacture of paper. The main reason for choosing this type of roof was the need for a clear span of 525 ft. to allow for future extensions to the plant. In fact, doubling, and even tripling, the size of the building in the near future has been allowed for. The roof consists of a steel deck suspended by four steel cables; it has a central span of 535 ft. and two side cantilevers each of 140 ft. The width is constant, at 98 ft. The whole roof structure is carried on four large reinforced concrete supports 164 ft. high."

-Pier Luigi Nervi. Translation by Giuseppe Nicoletti. New Structures. p164.

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Pier Luigi Nervi

by
Sara Askari

A Synthesis of Science and Art: Pier Luigi Nervi, Master Builder

Airplane hangers. Exhibition halls. A tobacco factory, a salt warehouse- how could such utilitarian structures draw attention from architecture critics using words like "exhilaration" and "grace?" The answer is found in a man described in person as "quiet and gray" but who, with his stern doctrine of "integrity, truth, and correctness" in building brought technological innovation and esthetic triumph to the landscape of Italy during a forty year period which spanned from Fascism through the economic boom years. Critics and writers have often varied their label for him, sometimes referring to him as an architect, sometimes as an engineer. But all recognized the genius of Pier Luigi Nervi as he combined technical expertise, intuition, pragmatism, and a material of his own invention- "ferro-cemento"- to achieve structural beauty in a tradition of Italian design which goes all the way back to the great buildings of ancient Rome.

Nervi was born in the last decade of the nineteenth century in the Italian Alps town of Sondrio. He attended the University of Bologna and joined the army engineering corps following the entanglement of Italy in World War One. After the war was over, he joined a group called "The Society for Concrete Construction." It was not until after he left the group in 1923 that his unique approach to building garnered critical attention. In 1926-27 he designed the Cinema Augusteo in Naples, and two years later he begun work on the Municipal Stadium in Florence. Up to this point, there was no reason to suspect that a fresh perspective of structure and form was about to show its possibilities for artistic expression. Rather, Nervi was awarded these first few projects simply because his bid was cheaper than any other designer's. The result of these projects was a revolutionary beauty following naturally from structural coherence.

To understand and appreciate Nervi's innovation, its necessary to realize that the tradition in which he was trained was not the great one of Roman antiquity but rather the unfortunate result of, oddly enough, the Age of Reason. It was during the Age of Reason that the fields of architecture and engineering were regretfully separated. In Roman times, the architect of a structure had also been the engineer, combining knowledge of geometry and materials with artistic expression. In medieval times this remained true, with the concept of the architect as the "master builder"- a label many twentieth century critics have admiringly bestowed on Nervi. Even in the Renaissance, the ideals of Science and Beauty went hand in hand and engineering was considered to be a part of art (Huxtable, 1960, p. 11).

All that changed, though, with the developments of calculus and industrialization. The field of architecture retreated into the Ivory Tower of universities and the field of engineering assumed responsibility for the construction of the bridges and factories of that explosive era using iron, steel, and concrete
(Huxtable, 1960, p. 12). Art and science had taken opposite sides. While engineers forged ahead with construction projects in the nineteenth century,
architects turned, sadly, to the reiteration of old ideals of artistic adornment. Rather then evolve alongside engineering and adapt to new functions for
buildings and the new materials used to build them, architecture unwisely decorated in styles of ages past. It borrowed from Gothic style here, from the
Romanesque over there, with maybe some French influence in between (Huxtable, 1960, p.13). And it derided the new engineering, such as that of concrete construction innovator Francois Hennebique, as admittedly practical but patently ugly to the trained, critical eye (Huxtable, 1960, p.15). For Nervi's early buildings to come from a man trained in this type of disparaging environment showed that he was truly an independent thinker and innovator unwilling to let neither "formal preconceptions or cultural reminiscences" interfere with his vision of the fulfilment of both structural and esthetic concerns. But how can anyone understand what exactly Nervi had built without seeing it for herself?

Imagine the average city parking garage. It is built in the form of a huge ungainly rectangle which sits plopped down on the corner of the block looking like the massive cement behemoth it is, silent and immovable. From the outside it is gray and plain, and from the inside it is dark and cave-like. I have never seen a picture of a Nervi parking garage, if there is even any such thing, but I can imagine one in contrast to the eyesore I just described. It would be gray, and plain, too, in the sense that it would lack any superfluous adornment. Rather than the word "plain," though, an adjective such as "austere" would come to mind. Rather than just sitting on the site, it would appear to have pushed its way up from under the soil like some type of organism, and would somehow seem to be soaring upward. Instead of looking like a dead inert mass, a Nervi garage would have elements of dynamic tension. If you went inside, you'd find light cascading in through the whole structure. There would be a sense of spaciousness and majesty about the inside. The ceiling would be the most awe inspiring part of the structure- Nervi's ceilings are described in words like "sunburst" and "lacework" (as well as the more technical "cantilevered roof trusses" and "lamella vault.") In effect, you would experience the Nervi union of utilitarianism and artistic beauty.

After his success with his first two buildings, Nervi obtained the contracts for several airplane hangers. His usual concerns for economic efficiency led him to the conclusion that some parts of the hangers should be prefabricated. This would save both time and money and would become a permanent strategy of Nervi's. The finished hangers were impressive, with parabolic arches and a lacy vaulted ceiling giving the seemingly contradictory impressions of both lightness and strength without steel girders or interior columns ("Poetry," 1957). Unfortunately, the Germans bombed the structures into rubble on their way out of Italy at the end of World War Two. A distraught Nervi, examining the remains of his work, was heartened to find that the prefabricated joints had held together even though they had been blown away from the rest of the building.

Instrumental in the development of the structures of industrialization was the use of reinforced concrete (Huxtable, 1960, p.14). After the second war, Nervi made a breakthrough in the field of reinforced concrete: the invention of ferro-cemento. Since it was to be his signature material from then on, it warrants quite a bit of description. Steel mesh was used as a core, and layers of cement mortar were brushed on top of it. The mesh was thin, flexible, and elastic, and its addition to cement created material which could withstand great strains. Ferro-cemento enabled Nervi to design any form he wanted, giving him a way to address the problems of stress and static equilibrium with greater freedom from convention than was ever before possible. To add to the economical properties of the substance, it could be easily prefabricated in plaster molds. Obviously, this material was used in a manner easy to imagine in the case of warehouses and factories, but the full range of ferro-cemento's possibilities is better illustrated by a more unlikely project. Nervi actually pre- fabricated a one inch thick boat hull, and while cement does not seem to be in the realm of anyone's choice for boat hull material, it proved to be quite sea worthy (Nervi, 1956, p.261).

In the next thirty years Pier Luigi Nervi would take on about twenty five more projects. Eventually, three of his four sons would also enter into the
construction business with him. Early after the war, he designed the Turin Exhibition Hall, which has earned such high praise as "one of the most impressive interior spaces of the century." The rebuilding of Europe and Italy's own "economic miracle" provided work for Nervi and others like him who took his cues on the necessity of function as design motive, and cement industrial structures sprang up everywhere. It was during this time that Nervi built a salt warehouse, then a tobacco factory in Bologna, and even the Fiat Works in Turin. He built such unglamourous structures as highway over- and underpasses, and a bus station in New York City which one critic improbably and delightedly compared to "an alighted butterfly " (Obituary in Progressive Architecture, 1979, p. 35). On the other hand, he recalled one of the traditional forums for Italian architectural greatness- religion- by designing the Papal Audience Hall. He won some awards, such as the 1962 Alfred Lindau Award from the American Concrete Institute.

Occasionally Nervi would take on a project so big that it necessitated collaboration with other architects. Some examples are the buildings for the 1960
Rome Olympics, the UNESCO company headquarters in Paris, and the Pirelli skyscraper. Critics were disappointed with the results of these last two
collaborations, and especially let down by Nervi. In these instances he seemed to force some kind of architectural statement rather than letting the statement develop naturally out of high quality technical solutions (Huxtable, 1960, p. 28).

In general, Nervi stayed true to his ideals of pragmatic solutions and a seemingly effortless achievement of artistic merit. He also extensively criticized the direction of modern architecture in the post-war boom years ( during which he was a professor at the University of Rome). He saw what he described as an "unrestrained search for the new at any price..even..inconstructibility.." (Nervi, 1963, p. 6). He described modern architectural students as having a "desire for structural audacity and the incapacity of its realization." (Nervi 1956, p. 261). Although he was a professor in the Ivory Tower of academia, he revealed that much of the current architectural instruction was misguided. He pointed out that there was much debate about the merit of this form or that form. However, the issues that really needed to be addressed, without any preconceptions or preferences of form, were the client's desires, economic limits, and the structural techniques and available technology. In other words, the architect should be guided by the particular problem of the particular project.

Nervi also placed great emphasis on the development of an architectural "intuition." By familiarizing oneself in the latest techniques in engineering and the capabilities of the latest building materials, one could develop an innate sense for problem solving. While mathematical training played a large part in this type of initial approach to a project, Nervi stressed that calculations alone wouldn't provide a solution. Rather, the architect's combination of technical skill with the expression of his own personality is what made a master builder capable of producing beauty through structural coherence.

Pier Luigi Nervi died in Rome on January 9, 1979 at the age of eighty-seven. The obituary writers referred to him as both architect and engineer, and recalled the combination of aesthetic sensitivity and structural logic in his designs (Obituary in Architectural Review, 1979, p.65). They remembered him as a modest and unassuming man who didn't talk very much and was always dressed in grey. Architectural critic Ada Louise Huxtable praised him for a "lyrical pragmatism which grew out of a precise and elegant mind" ("Master," 1979). His idea that competence and originality in meeting the functional needs of a project naturally results in beautiful solutions is not at all revolutionary today, but is accepted as common sense. While Nervi taught students during much of his career, he refused to take on a paternal role and trained no disciplines. Admonished Nervi, "Be yourself! Achieve what you want through initiative and effort!" (San Francisco Museum, 1961, p. 11).

Works Cited

Huxtable, Ada L. "Master Builder of the Modern Age (Obituary)." New York Times. 21 January 1979, D25. 2.

Pier Luigi Nervi. New York: G. Braziller, 1960.

Nervi, Pier L. Buildings, Projects, Structures, 1953-1963. (Trans. By Giuseppe Nicoletti). New York: Praeger, (1963).

"Obituary." Architectural Review. February 1979, p. 65; Progressive Architecture. February 1979, pp. 35-36.

"A Philosophy for Building 'Correctly'." Excerpts from "Construire Correttamente," by Pier Luigi Nervi. Architectural Record. April 1956, pp. 257-264.

"Poetry in Concrete." Time. 70. November 11, 1957, pp. 102-105.

San Francisco Museum of Art. Pier Luigi Nervi: Space and Structural Integrity. Alameda County, CA: Associated Arts Foundation, 1961.