Oscar Ribeiro de Almeida Niemeyer Soares Filho (1907–2012), known as Oscar Niemeyer, was a Brazilian architect considered to be one of the key figures in the development of modern architecture. Niemeyer was best known for his design of civic buildings for Brasília, a planned city that became Brazil’s capital in 1960, as well as his collaboration with other architects on the headquarters of the United Nations in New York. His exploration of the aesthetic possibilities of reinforced concrete was highly influential in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Lúcio Marçal Ferreira Ribeiro Lima Costa (1902 – 1998) was a Brazilian architect and urban planner, best known for his plan for Brazil. Costa became a figure associated with reconciling traditional Brazilian forms and construction techniques with international modernism, particularly the work of Le Corbusier. The Pilot Plan of Brasília, was a competition that Costa won in 1957 and was mostly built in 1958–1960.

Brasilia was (and indeed still is) the most magnificent example of the perfection of modern monumentalism. Who was reprised worldwide by many architets?

Although well represented by original and compelling buildings, Brasilia was mainly influenced by the Italian Fascist EUR (or E42), the famous new city planned by the architect Marcello Piacentini between 1935 and 1938 as the Italian site of the Roman Universal Exhibition of 1942, which was deleted by the war.

As the Roman EUR (completed and still existing since 1960), Brasilia is a collection of ministers, palaces, the Parliament, and the Cathedral.

The failure of C.I.A.M (International Congress of Modern Architecture)

The Wendell O. Pruitt Homes and William Igoe Apartments, known together as Pruitt–Igoe, were joint urban housing projects first occupied in 1954 in the US city of St. Louis, Missouri. Living conditions in Pruitt–Igoe began to decline soon after completion in 1956. By the late 1960s, the complex had become internationally infamous for its poverty, crime, and racial segregation. The 11-story high rises within the complex almost exclusively accomodated African-Americans. All 33 buildings were demolished with explosives in the mid-1970s, and the project has come to represent some of the failures of urban renewal, public-policy planning, and public housing.

The sails of the quarter Scampia in Naples

They were built between 1962 and 1975 on a project inspired by the Existenzminimum, an architectural current for which the living unit of the single family unit should have been reduced to the indispensable minimum, with therefore a limited construction expense, but with common spaces where the community was integrated. Di Salvo created the project taking inspiration from the alleys of the historic center of Naples, which, in his intentions, should have been recreated in a condominium.

Inspired by the principles of Le Corbusier's unités d'habitation, by the "gantry" structures proposed by Kenzo Tange and more generally by macrostructural models, Di Salvo divided the layout of the district into two building types: "tower" and "tent." This last type, which gives the predominant image of the Vele complex, is characterized by the sectional juxtaposition of two inclined lamellar buildings, separated by a large central void and crossed by long galleries suspended at an intermediate height compared to the accommodation rates. The project also included meeting centers and common spaces, a play area for children, and other collective equipment. The failure to realize this "socialization nucleus" was certainly a contributing cause of its resounding failure. The project is similar, but only in the form of sloping floors - to that of the buildings designed in 1960 by André Minangoy for the Baie des Anges of Villeneuve-Loubet, in the south of France, which underwent a much different development and received a notable success. Other similar buildings are present in the Olympic Village of Montreal.

Between 1997 and 2003, three of the seven initial structures were demolished, leaving the remaining four standing. The decision to act on a situation of severe degradation was taken at the end of the eighties, supported and ventilated by the population, which denounced the serious conditions of the Vele. The first to fall was Vela F, demolished with bulldozers in August 1998, after a first attempt with explosives failed in December 1997 (only part of it fell, leaving the upper floors practically intact and poised on the rubble below). The second was the Vela G, whose demolition using explosives was successfully carried out in February 2000 under the direction of the explosives expert Danilo Coppe. Similarly, Vela H, initially excluded from demolition as it needed to be redeveloped and refunctionalised, was instead also demolished in April 2003. The first two interventions were promoted by the municipal council led by Mayor Antonio Bassolino, and the third by the council chaired by Rosa Russo Iervolino. On August 29, 2016, a municipal resolution provided for the demolition of three sails and the redevelopment of the fourth, the celestial sail. The municipality sent the project to the government to obtain approval for the allocation of eighteen million euros, the funds necessary to proceed with the intervention.

[On March 3, 2017, the approval of the allocation of the necessary funding for the demolition of three of the four remaining sails was made official by Mayor Luigi de Magistris. In 2019, the Municipality launched the new step of Restart Scampia, a project financed with 27 million euros that involves the demolition of three sails and the redevelopment of the neighborhood, including renovating the celestial sail, which will house the offices of the Metropolitan City.

The demolition of the green sail began on February 20, 2020, and was completed in July of the same year.

After the modern architecture

Fve architects

Name of a group of five American architects formed in the late 1960s in New York. The intellectual affinity that united them, summarized by A. Drexler as “an alternative to political romanticism," was due not to professional collaboration but to frequent meetings in the context of university teaching. On the occasion of the meeting and the annual exhibition of the Conference of Architects for the Study of the Environment (New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1969), some critics saw in the work of the Five Architects the “establishment of a New York school”: the exhibition catalog was published in 1972 under the title Five Architects. Together, they formed the representation of the USA at the 15th Milan Triennale (1973).

Paolo Portoghesi

Paolo Portoghesi (1931) is an Italian architect, theorist, historian, and professor of architecture at the University of La Sapienza in Rome. He is a former president of the architectural section of the Venice Biennale (1979–92), editor-in-chief of the journal Controspazio (1969–83), and dean of the Faculty of Architecture at the Politecnico di Milano University (1968–78). Portoghesi studied architecture at the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Rome, completing his studies in 1957. He began teaching the history of criticism at the same faculty in 1961. Portoghesi opened an architectural practice with architect-engineer Vittorio Gigliotti (born 1921) in Rome in 1964. He has specialized in teaching and researching classical architecture, especially Baroque architecture, and in particular Borromini, but also Michelangelo. His interest in more contemporary architecture coincided largely with that of his colleague in Rome, Bruno Zevi, in championing a more organic form of modernism, evident in, for instance, the work of Victor Horta and Frank Lloyd Wright, and in Italy with neorealism and the Liberty style. This attitude has continued throughout Portoghesi’s career, and is clearly visible in his own architecture. It is also evident in his concern for the study of nature, brought to the fore in his more recent book “Nature and Architecture” (2000).

Roberto Gabetti & Aimaro Isola

Roberto Gabetti (1925 - 2000) was an Italian architect and university professor. For fifty years, he was a teacher at the Polytechnic of Turin. He was already talented at the beginning of his design activity. Together with Aimaro Oreglia d'Isola, he opened an architecture studio in Via Sacchi in Turin. Among his first works are the Stock Exchange (Turin) and the Bottega di Erasmo (Turin, 1957–1959). He was the founder of "Neoliberty," active in a heated controversy that brings Italian architecture and its alleged departure from the Modern Movement to international attention. The activity of Studio Gabetti e Isola continued intensively in the following decades, with particular attention to technological experimentation and with indifference to the ideological and figurative prejudices characteristic of an entire generation. Aimaro Oreglia d’Isola, better known as Aimaro Isola (1928), is an Italian architect. After graduating in architecture from the Polytechnic of Turin (1952), he teaches at the University of Turin. In 1950, he created a studio with Roberto Gabetti. In the late 1950s, they were among the major exponents of the Neoliberty movement. Among their works, created mainly in the area of Piedmont (although worldwide recognized! ), the Paravia House (Piazza Statuto, Turin), the Stock Exchange (also in Turin, with Gabetti), the Justice Palace in Alba , residential complexes, urban projects, and artistic refurbishments; they also dealt with religious architecture, with particular research concepts. After Roberto Gabetti’s death in 2000, Aimaro Isola continued his work as a designer by founding the Isolarchitetti studio with his son Saverio.

Mario Botta

Mario Botta (1943) is a Swiss architect. Botta designed his first building, a two-family house at Morbio Superiore in Ticino, aged 16. He graduated from the Università Iuav di Venezia (1969). While the arrangements of spaces in this structure are inconsistent, its relationship to its site, separation of living from service spaces, and deep window recesses echo of what would become his stark, strong, towering style. His designs tend to include a strong sense of geometry, often based on very simple shapes, yet creating unique volumes of space. His buildings are often made of brick, yet his use of materials is wide, varied, and often unique. His trademark style can be seen widely in Switzerland, particularly in the Ticino region, and also in the Mediatheque in Villeurbanne (1988), a cathedral in Évry (1995), the Church of the Holy Face in Turin (2006), and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, or SFMOMA (1994).

Aldo Rossi

Aldo Rossi (1931–1997) was an Italian architect and designer who achieved international recognition in four distinct areas: architectural theory, drawing and design, and product design. He was one of the leading exponents of the postmodern movement. He was the first Italian to receive the Pritzker Prize for architecture. His earliest works of the 1960s were mostly theoretical and displayed a simultaneous influence of 1920s Italian modernism (see Giuseppe Terragni), the classicist influences of Viennese architect Adolf Loos, and the reflections of the painter Giorgio de Chirico. A trip to the Soviet Union to study Stalinist architecture also left a marked impression. Rossi held that the city remembers its past (our “collective memory”) and that we use that memory through monuments; that is, monuments give structure to the city. He was also a talented designer; the distinctive independence of his buildings is reflected in the micro-architectures of the products he created. During the 1980s, Rossi designed stainless steel cafetières and other products for Alessi, Pirelli, and others.

Charles Moore

Charles Willard Moore (1925–1993) was an American architect, educator, writer, fellow of the American Institute of Architects, and winner of the AIA Gold Medal in 1991. He is often labeled as the father of post-modernism. His work as an educator was important to a generation of American architects who read his books or studied with him at one of the several universities where he taught. Moore preferred bold, colorful design elements, including striking color combinations, supergraphics, stylistic eclecticism, and the use of non-traditional materials such as plastic, (aluminized) PET film, platinum tiles, and neon signs. His work often provokes arousal, challenges norms, and can lean toward kitsch. He never hid his love for roadside vernacular buildings in places like San Miguel Allende, the Sunset Strip, and Main Street in Disneyland.