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in a new light, and an essay by Roberto Einaudi, who served as Nervi’s translator for the lectures, offers previously unpublished details about how these came about and how they became Aesthetics and Technology in Building.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
Cristiana Chiorino, partner of Comunicarch Associates, has contributed to « La sauvegarde des grandes œuvres d’ingénierie du XXème siècle », by Franz Graf and Yvan Delemontey, the first issue of the Cahiers du TSAM, Techniques et Sauvegarde de l’Architecture Moderne dedicated to the conservation of the 20th century’s great works of engineering, aims to explore the future of some of the most remarkable and emblematic concrete structures of the previous century. Through the personalities of the heroic builders, this publication aims to consider what the engineers – the most daring of whom (Freyssinet, Isler, Maillart, Nervi, Vierendeel, etc.) are represented here – bequeathed to the century. While the conservation of 20th century architecture has in recent years been seen as a discipline in its own right, the conservation of 20th century engineering is still in its infancy. Considered too offen purely from the point of view of security or maintenance, these works are now often seen as true masterpieces, cutting edge achievements of the “engineer’s art”, as stunning for their plastic beauty as for their technical performance. This publication provides an opportunity to stimulate, with reference to concrete examples and projects, an awareness of the heritage challenges to be addressed in the field of engineering. 
