The arrival of the information model, 1969. The new international building industrialization frontier and Italy’s “Electronic Challenge”

The 1960s saw the first proliferation of opportunities to adopt computers in the production of the built environment. In Italy, the arrival of the computer was closely intertwined with research in the field of building industrialization. Through journals, books and the fundamental 1969 exhibition La sfida elettronica (The electronic challenge) at the Building Industrialization Fair in Bologna, its protagonists were among the most significant promoters of the computer as a tool for managing the complexity of building projects, as well as the main reporters on relevant international experiences in this sense. Such interest in the computer had to do with its being an “information machine”: an instrument capable of collecting, processing, and transmitting unprecedented quantities of information, a significant aspect given the amount of data exchanged between the actors of the construction process. The most advanced applications of computers in design showcased at the 1969 exhibition and in the following years were constituted by early forms of building information modelling developed abroad, especially in England. The fascination they sparked derived from the fact that they condensed many of the recurring themes of the coeval Italian debates on building industrialization: the idea of open, component-based prefabrication, performance design, and meta-design, all of which embodied political as well as technical and economic ambitions in the Italian 1960s. This study identifies key aspects of Italian research on such alliance between information and industrialization, acknowledging how it was developing in a system of international exchanges and how it especially looked at concrete prototypical applications from the Anglo-Saxon world. It analyzes the beginnings and original aspirations of modes of the profession whose historical development is still ongoing and open-ended.