The lost language of cranes

Hidden drawings in Genoese INA-Casa projects

Abstract

On 28 February 1949, the Italian Parliament passed into law the Provvedimenti per incrementare l'occupazione operaia, agevolando la costruzione di case per lavoratori, presented to the Council in July of the previous year by Christian Democrat Minister Amintore Fanfani. Financed by a hybrid system involving the participation of the State, employers, and, through a deduction from the monthly salary, employees, the plan revealed its character as a programme of national solidarity, becoming an instrument for expanding not only blue-collar employment as in its declared objectives but also the commitment of the Italian design sector, ending up being "a characteristic example of the meeting between social needs and architecture". This is within the forecasts and possibilities activated and granted by regulations oriented "to a continuous revision and updating of the general rules, against all bureaucratic custom". This character of urgency determines the compression of project drafting times and the simplification of individual approval processes, constituting an unexpected possibility, an unanticipated free pass for some of the young architects involved in the action. On the one hand, the vagueness and poor definition of the required graphic designs allow for modifications, even substantial ones, to be made during the work, capable of allowing elements to appear that are often absent from the approved project plans; on the other hand, the urgency with which local administrations express the need to carry out interventions guarantees the architects autonomy over certain aspects of the project that have been removed from preliminary sharing. These elements are often unconventional, unorthodox concerning the logic and rigours of modernity, unexpected, sometimes contradictory, and open up that experimental dimension that the tremendous social challenge contains within itself and on which it continually feeds. This article describes some of these traces, hidden in the projects and emerging in the architecture of the INA-Casa season in Genoa. Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)