Brutalist Italy is the first photographic book of its kind with a selection of more than 100 Italian brutalist buildings shown through 146 images taken by the Italian architectural photographers Roberto Conte and Stefano Perego.
Over the past 5 years, the two Italian photographers, authors of Soviet Asia (FUEL, 2019), have traveled more than 20,000 km crossing all the regions of the peninsula to document the great variety of buildings built in this style, the majority between the 1960s and the 1980s.
From the Casa del Portuale in Naples to the Jesi cemetery, from the Sanctuary of Monte Grisa in Trieste to the "Washing Machines" in Genoa, the book collects surprising examples of Italian brutalist architecture, characterized by the use of exposed reinforced concrete as well as clear and well-defined structural elements, which outline a unique aesthetic.
The dual-language book contains text in both Italian and English: an introduction by Adrian Forty, professor emeritus of architectural history at the Bartlett School of Architecture - University College of London and an afterword by the photographers.
From the introduction by Adrian Forty: “It was, though, above all in their willingness to acknowledge that concrete could be of more than one time, that it could represent both the present (or the future) and the past simultaneously, that Italian architects stood out from their counterparts elsewhere in the world. Generally, during the twentieth century, concrete was treated exclusively as a future-oriented medium – it signified an age that had not arrived, and the fact that it also had a past was strenuously denied. But circumstances in Italy made architects anxious to represent its past as well as its future”.
ISBN
9781739887834Title
Brutalist Italy: Concrete Architecture from the Alps to the Mediterranean SeaAuthor
Roberto Conte, Stefano Perego .Publisher
Fuel PublishingPublication year
2023Binding
HardcoverLanguage
English, Italian