From Rationalism to Brutalism: An Architectural Heritage to Be Sustainability Transformed. Intervention Strategies

The landscape of destruction that characterized Europe after World War II prompted architects, first and foremost British architects, to search for a new language that would depart from the sentimentalist language of Neo Empiricism and Neo Realism. In a context marked by a serious social emergency and a strong need for renewal linked to the problem of post-war reconstruction, the architects Alison and Peter Smithson coined the term Brutalism in 1954, an architectural phenomenon destined to spread shortly afterwards to the rest of Europe and America, becoming a true architectural current. Their main intent was to create great works at a reduced cost, bringing out the authenticity of the materials used in construction through a simple and repetitive architecture, made of raw materials, that could receive great approval from society and mark the overcoming of the Modern Movement. Many architects in Italy and around the world in the 1980s—even the most representative ones in terms of public use, size and archi-tectural solemnity—turned to “brutalist” architecture [1] derived from the works of Le Corbusier and later James Stirling, Denys Lasdun, Louis Kahn and Paul Rudolph, and as Zaha Hadid and Tadao Ando continued to do in the buildings of the Vitra Museum in Weil am Rhein until 1993. The extremism of the poetics of béton brut has led to the construction of buildings with perimeter walls and roof ceilings, as well as floors on unheated spaces, lacking thermal insulation, which today are extremely costly to manage, at least when they do not present serious thermo-hygrometric pathologies [2]. The challenge is to identify intervention solutions that achieve the objectives of economic feasibility, energy efficiency and sustainability of the project, while respecting the original architectural configuration, proposing strategies that can be applied in all similar cases.