Pier Luigi Nervi. Aesthetics and Technology in Building: the Twenty-First-Century Edition | University Of Illinois Press | 2018
In 2017 Cristiana Chiorino has been the editor with Elisabetta Margiotta Nervi and Thomas Leslie, for the new edition of the Norton Lectures given by Pier Luigi Nervi in 1965 in Harvard, Aesthetics and Technology in Building: The Twenty-First-Century Edition. Nervi was invited to deliver one-third of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in Poetry at Harvard in 1961-62, along with fellow designer/engineers Felix Candela and Buckminster Fuller. The Norton Lectures had a long tradition of inviting both traditional poets, and artists whose work evoked poetry, but that year’s invitees were particularly striking. Could engineers be considered poets? In an era of profound optimism about technology’s prospects, this was an inspired choice.This new edition introduces Nervi’s ideas about architecture and engineering to a new generation of students and admirers. More than 200 photographs, details, drawings, and plans show how Nervi put his ideas into practice. Expanding on the seminal 1961 Norton Lectures at Harvard, Nervi analyzes various functional and construction problems. He also explains how precast and cast-in-place concrete can answer demands for economy, technical and functional soundness, and aesthetic perfection. Throughout, he uses his major projects to show how these now-iconic buildings emerged from structural truths and far-sighted construction processes. This new edition features a new introduction and essays by Joseph Abram and Alberto Bologna on Nervi’s life, work, and legacy, a center spread of new images by German photographer Hans-Christian Schink shows Nervi’s roof patterns in a new light, and an essay by Roberto Einaudi, who served as Nervi’s translator for the lectures, offers previously unpublished details about how these came about and how they became Aesthetics and Technology in Building.
Client: University of Illinois Press
Year: 2018