Rationalist architecture

Senigallia, Marches, Italy
Est. 5.9km / 1 hr 59 mins

The urban expancion of Senigallia in the first three decades of the twentieth century identifies mainly in the succession of urbanistic operations that tends most of all to promote the coastal expancion of small villas housebuilding. Apart from some localized construction and hydrauilc works (like the constuction of Bagni establshment, the demolition of the Ghetto and the burial of the stream Penna), the program of coastal riqualification, beginned at the beginning of the twentieth century and linked to a popular develop’s logic of the touristic-bathing activity, provides the tracking and the plantation of tree-lined avenue for walking and social meetings, the public lightining and the addition of sidewalk on the streets and prepares the increase of the equipment specifically helioterapic, sportive and of performance.This building rush at the start of the century, stopped by the first World War and vigorously restarted in 1920 with a new policy of modernization and urban infrastructuring, it inflicted a changing phase with the earthquake of the 30th October 1930, event that affected radically the image and the twentyth century’s develop of the city. After that followed a plan of demolition and housebuilding consolidation with the transformation of the Hitorical Centre by the practice of gutting and thinning, very used in those years and generally caused from urban hygenic’s needs, and a plan of ricostruction and develop of the city, done through the drafting of a Town Plan. The Town Plan of 21 April 1931, drown up from the Civil Engineer, outlines that growing strategy through that, the city obtained nowadays image. The basic criteria on which is based the rebuilding see, on one hand, the necessity to archieve the renewal of the city structure, on the other hand, the predisposition of new occasion for the growing of the balneatic tourism, main activity and main form of gaining of the city.The general setting of the plan suffer of a scenographic vision of the urban framework with straights, cross, squares and backgrounds; in this seat will take in exam not mainly the intervents located in private housebuilding, like these that have mainly influenced significative transformation of the urban fabric.In the building of the image of renewed and enlarged tourist accomodation, the rationalist influence seems to become more evident than in other part of the city. The realization of a square in replacement at the ancient estuary of the stream Penna, transformed in the folding bracket of two main avenues of the seafront and of the perpendicular avenue that comes from the city, create a large space that become hearth of the balneatic life where the perspective of the new platform, called “Rotonda a mare”, shows the willness of reborn of the city as climatc-tourist station.The choice of put as center of the first public social architecture Leopardi avenue in Senigallia, the building GIL and, behind it, the elementary school, expression of his power and of his ideology, can be read as a refuse from the fascist part of the ninetyth century city and as a research of a model of open urbanization to define new types of settlement. The rule kept by the avenue answered at the futuristic aspiration of express dymamism too, movement, physical energetic action, datas to transmit to all the social company and, in that moment, shared from the italian rationalism into conceive a new aesthetic for a new politic and social struggle.The local commission“dell’ornato”tends to the simplification of choices extremely “eclectic”of the designers and the new architecture draws to schematic plants with the use of modern construction type and reinforced concrete.In those years, at national level, easy ornamentations are losing, cementitious decorations, artificial stone frame and stratum roofs. The choices of Popular Houses Institute are going in this direction with measures of Pace district and of Villa Aosta, then chaired from the architect Alberto Calza Bini that, with the architects Marcello Piacentini and Innocenzo Costantini, was between the authors of the modern chancing under the auspices of a representative and monumental architecture of the fascist system.

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