"Nell'era dei computer". Architecture, new technology, and politics in the Italian Sixties

The Sixties were a period of epochal transformations for Italy’s economy, culture, political landscape, arts, and territory, and constituted the terrain for significant reflections on the role of technology in society. In the Italian Sixties, the arrival of a new technology, the computer, was accompanied by great aspirations also as far as its adoption in architectural design and in the production of the built environment was concerned. From the enthusiastic years which followed the launch of Olivetti’s ELEA 9003 mainframe and Turin’s 1961 Expo, at the zenith of the country’s postwar economic miracle, unprecedented industrialisation and technological euphoria, to the period of hard political contestation, academic reform and counterculture which had crucial moments in the students’ and workers’ protests of 1967-1969, many prominent figures of the Italian architectural scene wrote intensely about the computer, and in some cases even adopted it in experimental computer aided design processes. To this date, an extensive historical study of this relationship, which had internationally relevant protagonists such as Luigi Moretti, Giancarlo De Carlo, and Manfredo Tafuri, and lesser-known ones – albeit of great interest – such as Leonardo Mosso, Laura Castagno and Maurizio Sacripanti, has not been carried out. As a sort of map, this thesis identifies some of the main fields where the computer and a computer culture were envisioned as instruments which could bring about a renewal of design disciplines: the world of operations research and “scientific” design methodologies in architecture; the world of building industrialisation; and the multifaceted world of what would be known as “programmed” architecture. Each of these worlds had its climaxes, crises, and protagonists, often with different or even conflictual gazes on the matter. The expectations towards the computer expressed within these fields were tightly interwoven with the broader, burning themes which, each one with its rhythm and historical milestones throughout the decade, characterised the political and theoretical debates of the Italian Sixties. In particular, themes which will emerge in the thesis and which will constitute the context of chosen architectural cases studies are those of the complex notion of democracy in a society which had been through the fascist regime, after the new democratic constitution; the question concerning intellectual labour within the neo-capitalistic system of production, which also concerned the notion of participation; and, deeply connected with all the former, the question concerning the machine and the possibility of its critical and politically engaged use. Fed by a network of international exchanges, such intertwinings of architecture, pioneering explorations of computers and political questions were deeply imbedded in the Italian context of that period; however, in a different context with inevitably different characteristics, the aspects of the relationship between technology, politics, and architecture they investigated are still urgent and problematic.