Il quartiere Nicolosi a Latina (1934-1936): storie di integrazione e nuovi orizzonti per la conservazione dell’edilizia popolare del primo Novecento

In 1934, Giuseppe Nicolosi was appointed design architect of a new public housing neighborhood to build beyond the perimeter of the Oriolo Frezzotti’s town planning scheme. The project included about 342 apartments to house the workers involved both in land reclamation and in the construction of the new town. For the first time in a building program of such size, the corridors were eliminated, the kitchens reduced, partial divisions inserted between connecting rooms characterized by minimal walkable areas. The rationality of the building language was functional both to the purpose of cost control and to the construction time reduction. The figurative characterization of the external balconies, the plasticity of the staircase towers and the accurate definition of common spaces, show that the extreme cost constraint didn’t represent a limit for the design creativity. Eighty years after its opening, the neighborhood is altered in physical consistency and affected by obsolescence due to the building techniques and the changed living habits. It also suffered a substantial depopulation from the old generations looking for social redemption; in recent years, it returned to be a workers' quarter mainly occupied by foreign citizens, a phenomenon that expresses a new social renewal. Extending the concept of heritage to the large scale of the machines à habiter represents a cultural choice that defines new horizons for the conservation project. The proposed study considers both the terms ‘hybridization’ and ‘contamination’ in an integrated vision dedicated to the conservation of humble but non-marginal twentieth-century documents. The main goal is to combine the compatibility of the intervention with the ease of execution and the cost constraint, without betray the consolidated principles of conservation.