After the end of the Second World War several European States projected throughout the extended Mediterranean, ¿ with the political and strategic backup of the United Nations, Development Cooperation, Ford Foundations,¿ to support the social and economic modernization of less developed countries and former colonies, from North Africa to Iran. The most promising or prestigious professional and architectural-engineering firms opened their local offices in those countries to design and implement development plans, infrastructures, public buildings, neighbourhoods. Most of these programs were soon joined by private entrepreneurial initiatives. These prominent public-private economic and political network of synergies have been scarcely explored as a whole while they are neglected proofs of how the States actively shaped and created markets and steered innovative changes. In recent years some of these projects have been the subject of curatorial researches, publications and exhibitions especially focused on the work of solo architects or of complex cultural phenomenons as Mediterranean modernism, Post-colonial Urbanism. There is a lack of in-depth analysis to measure comprehensively the impact of European architectural and urban culture in shaping and inventing the collective identity in the extended Mediterranean. The proposal intends to reconstruct a half-century picture of a proactive cross-disciplinary constellation of European technical and intellectual skills, spread in the Mediterranean. This will provide unpredicted interpretations compared with the mainstream architectural historiography of the twentieth century. Throughout a European digital collection, the research will document a hybridised cultural legacy and explore the future role that Europe could play for the next reconstructions of territories in the Near and Middle East, and in Africa tackling the balance between urbanization and human survival enhancing urban quality and avoiding past mistakes.
A different reading
One of the main innovative aspects of the present research is that of wanting to build within an overall synoptic framework of the activity of design / construction of Italian architects abroad, in particular in the Mediterranean and in the East. Usually the events design and the built results of these experiences is investigated in the monographic works of the respective authors and within a framework conceptual and interpretative which sees the authors of the works whether or not they adhere to modernist (rationalism) or traditionalist positions (vernacular), although the economic and political framework in which they were created is documented.
The ability to read overall (geography and chronology) the wealth of actions carried out in multiple countries by a restricted circle of European designers can offer the possibility of new historiographic and interpretative points of view, which exceed some readings by now
insufficient to explain some historical events considered exemplary for morphological, typological and language experimentation architectural.
The best known and documented part of the story to be investigated, half a century long, is that of the 1950s and 1970s, in particular the one closest to the events of the CIAM of 1947 (CIAM6 Cities Reimagined, held in Bridgewater UK) in which Candilis, Josic, Woods played an important role.
The exhibition organized by Maristella Casciato and Tom Avermaete presented at the Canadian Center for is important in this period Architecture in Montréal (Canada) "Casablanca Chandigardth" which highlights "How architects, experts, politicians, international agencies and citizens negotiate modern planning: Casablanca Chandigarh [...] With this gathering of delegates the center of CIAM had shifted with the migration of its members from Germany and Spain to Britain and America. The map of CIAM's influence was expanding to India, Sri Lanka, Africa, Cuba and South America while it was shrinking in Russia and Eastern Europe with the approaching Cold War. By 1947 more women had a role to play as do young members just starting to practice". (Http://www.ciam6.co.uk/)
Or, for example, the essays by Alberto Ferlenga, 'Fernand Pouilllon: The stones of Algiers' in Casabella 66, no. 706/707, 2002/03, pp. 49/51; and by Jean Lucien Bonillo, 'Fernand Pouillon in Algier', in Bauwelt 94, no. 26, 2003, pp. 50/59.
The events and the protagonists between the 70s and 90s are documented less systematically. An important contribution is the catalog of the Venice Biennial Exhibition of 1982 "Architecture in Islamic countries: second international architecture exhibition" by P. Portoghesi.
The role of international diplomacy and development cooperation
A second relevant and innovative aspect would derive from the comparison between the point of view of architecture and that of the role of architecture international diplomacy and development cooperation. So from the comparison between aspects related to the construction of identity national and / or institutional created by architecture and economic, institutional and political relations. From the comparisons already started with some scholars would seem fundamental to consider the archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, albeit vast. However, one of the aspects that we intend to demonstrate is when the interaction between public and private initiative has been able to solicit also in Italy fruitfully professional opportunities and quality projects (Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: debunking public vs. private sector myths, Anthem 2013; Elisabetta Bini, 'Selling Gasoline with a Smile: Gas Station Attendants between the United States, Italy and the Third World, 1955-1970 ', International Labor and Working-Class History, vol. 81, n.1, 2012, pp. 69-93).
In essence, the proposed research will build (updating) an unpublished overall picture and propose an original reading with respect to the literature already published in Architecture on these issues. The research will also attempt a first survey of the role of networks diplomatic, corporate, institutional in the countries under study, which have supported and supported European professionals and companies in the Mediterranean and the East for over fifty years.
It is an operating method that seems to have been almost completely dissolved in the past twenty years, certainly because the countries in political issues have profoundly changed and there is no longer the political and institutional stability present in the immediate phase
postcolonial and postwar. But that should be reconsidered with respect to the possible future opportunities (short and long term) of reconstruction and new construction that could come from the Middle East and Africa. And considering the serious market crisis professional of European (and in particular Italian) architecture of the last twenty years.