Lecture

Territorio. Devising Theories of the Built Environment in Postwar Italy

Paolo Scrivano

Public Lecture

Suspended between idyllic memories of the past and the contemporary reality of a landscape that bears the signs of an imperfect process of modernization, during the second half of the 20^th century Italy emerged as an important testing ground for many theoretical speculations around the built environment. Focusing on a period that goes approximately from the 1950s to the 1970s, this talk aims to offer an introduction to the postwar Italian debate on architecture, urban design, planning practices, and city center preservation policies, drawing a distinction between what was imported (and mediated) from abroad and what originated locally. Indeed, in those years Italian architectural culture displayed a remarkable attention for the physical, material and cultural contexts within which projects and plans are situated, providing an imaginative contribution to what became a wide-reaching discussion.

Bio: Paolo Scrivano is Associate Professor of History of architecture at the Politecnico di Milano. After receiving a Ph.D. from the Politecnico di Torino, he has taught at the University of Toronto, at Boston University, and at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. He has been Visiting Scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, and Ailsa Mellon Bruce Visiting Senior Fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study in the Visual Arts of the National Gallery of Art. He is scientific coordinator of the international network Mapping Architectural Criticism, based at the Université Rennes 2.

Image: cover of the journal Edilizia Moderna, issue n. 87-88, 1965

This lecture has been conceived by the Chair of Architectural History at Goethe University Frankfurt as part of the course „What is Architectural Theory?“ offered by Daniela Ortiz dos Santos in the summer semester 2026. For further information, please contact ortiz@kunst.uni-frankfurt.de