Gustavo Giovannoni ed Enrico Calandra: una storia per gli architetti

Much has been written about the changes in academic training and the profession of architects in Italy during the first decades of the 20th century. The new architect was not only a technician and not only an artist, he was called an “integral architect”, a complete professional figure in charge of old crafts and new tasks, ranging from history to restoration, from urban development to architectural design, from structural knowledge to ornamental matters. Less known is, instead, the debate about transformation in history of architecture or, better, about what Gustavo Giovannoni called “integral history of architecture”. History which was able to connect in an organic vision different aspects of buildings: forms, functions, languages, construction, structures, materials and techniques. Through the letters (since 1926 to 1946) between Gustavo Giovannoni and Enrico Calandra we could analyse a crucial moment for Italian historiography: the one in which architects started claiming history of architecture as their own field of investigation. The transfer between art historians and architects wasn’t painless, but the withdrawal of architecture from the heart of academic art, history disclosed new and wide areas of interest. Letters, notes and correspondences highlight the different passages needed to make a new discipline take its shape: from the first requests (in 1926) of articles about history of architecture for “Architettura e Arti decorative” to the editorial planning for “Palladio” (1938-41) and getting to the project, not eventually realized, of an history of architecture written by many different authors (as Gustavo Giovannoni, Massimo Pallottino, Carlo Cecchelli, Mario Salmi, Enrico Calandra, Gino Chierici, Giulio Ulisse Arata) that should have been the answer to the history of art by Adolfo Venturi (1941-45).