Gustavo Giovannoni e Giuseppe Zander, un passaggio di testimone fra progetti e cantieri

Reading Giuseppe Zander’s (1920-1990), archive documents - preserved in the private archive - the figure of Gustavo Giovannoni comes out in those years between 1946 and 1947 which represent for the young architect the entry into the professional world and for Giovannoni the conclusion of his life. Zander enrolled at the Faculty of Architecture of Rome in 1939 - the same year Giovannoni founded the "Centro Studi di Storia dell’Architectura” of which Zander would be president from 1974 to 1978 - and graduated in 1946, as soon as the exit from the dark period of the war made it possible to restart civil life. If Giovannoni is professor and maestro (G. Zander, Memoria, in R. Luciani, MO Zander, P. Zander (edited by), Giuseppe Zander architetto, note e disegni dall’archivio privato, Roma 1997, p.32 ), Zander is his "last true and direct student" (V. Franchetti Pardo, Giuseppe Zander e la sua opera. Considerazioni sulla storia dell’Architettura, in: in Archivio della Società Romana di Storia Patria, 114, 1991, pp.215- 223). The memory explores this double connection teacher/pupil in shared activities whose testimony is preserved in the papers of the Giuseppe Zander private archive and in the works in which the two architects worked together or in temporal continuity. Whether it is a new architecture (such as the church of San Giovanni Battista in Formia, 1946-1947 and 1948-52) or interventions on a monument (such as the church of Santa Maria del Piano in Ausonia, 1916 and 1951-1954 ) or activities of study and dissemination on the themes of the history of architecture, the methodological approach that emerges can be compared to underline other connections between the two figures that seem to be joined by a similar vision of the architect's function and his spectrum of activities. The documents relating to the early years of the activity of Zander as an architect tell us just this aspect: an attitude to work on architecture that did not contemplate the rigid disciplinary barriers that, in a few decades, were to characterize teaching and profession.