Of Nicola Mattei
Genova, 15 ago – What unites the Corviale snake in Rome, an attempt that started badly and ended worse to build a public housing "barracks" in Soviet style bridge over the Polcevera collapsed yesterday? A name, that of engineer Riccardo Morandi.
Born in Rome in 1902, he began his activity in the 1930s by experimenting - among the first in Italy - with the use of reinforced concrete and pre-stressed reinforced concrete. At the beginning of his career he designed churches and cinemas, and then specialized in the construction of bridges.
The skills in the field of reinforced concrete they are worth the call to the team that will design and build the Corviale, where Morandi will work alongside the architect Mario Fiorentino. The result is dramatic: almost a kilometre (e 11 floors in height) of a real city dormitory on the outskirts of the capital where the building boom of those years created eco-monsters destined to last and produce devastating effects. Applied social engineering will result in failure, managing to replicate for the worse all the distortions imported from the total and totalitarian planning that was experimented in the same period in the Soviet Union.
An ideological aspect, the latter, which cannot be overlooked. We are in the Italy of the conflict (also armed), in which remaining helpless in the face of political opposition is almost impossible. E Morandi had made his choice: “His family – writes Repubblica on the occasion of his death, er he 25 December of 1989 – they remember him as a man who always made a point of defending his independence from all powers, starting with the fascist one of which he was an opponent".
Source: https://www.ilprimatonazionale.it/cronaca/antifascismo-ecomostri-chi-era-riccardo-morandi-91330/