Florence — Michelucci, the SMN Station and Organic Rationalism

History

Giovanni Michelucci was born in Pistoia in 1891 and trained as an architect in Florence. He came to national prominence as the leader of the Gruppo Toscano, which won the 1932–33 competition for the new Santa Maria Novella station with a project that was simultaneously the most radical and the most contextual of the submissions: a single horizontal structure clad in pietra forte, with no ornament and no historical quotation, that acknowledged the Gothic church across the piazza by refusing to compete with it in height or decoration. The building opened in 1935 and remains in daily use as Florence’s main station.

Pier Luigi Nervi’s Stadio Artemio Franchi, designed from 1929 and built in two phases between 1930 and 1933, predates the station and is, if anything, more structurally adventurous: its exposed reinforced concrete — the cantilevered roof over the main stand, the helical staircases, the 55-metre Marathon Tower — turns structural engineering into architectural expression. The original Nervi structure is protected by the heritage superintendency. The Cinema La Compagnia (Via Cavour 50r), radically redesigned by Adolfo Natalini of Superstudio in 1987, connects Florence’s Rationalist inheritance to the Postmodern moment in a building that uses pietra serena — the grey sandstone of Brunelleschi — as a contemporary material.

The Architettura Radicale movement was founded in Florence in the late 1960s by groups including Superstudio and Archizoom: a critique of the modern movement’s social optimism in the form of ironic megastructure proposals and utopian anti-architecture manifestos. Superstudio’s Continuous Monument (1969) — a reflective grid-surfaced slab extending across every landscape — became the most influential architectural provocation of its generation. Its founders, including Adolfo Natalini and Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, continued to practise in Florence into the 2000s.