EniWAY. Architecture, art and cities

From the motel to the new city projects , outcomes , utopias of the corporate culture by Mattei Eni contests '68
In 1952 Enrico Mattei entrusted to the architect Mario Bacciocchi the commission for the study of a prototype of futuristic service station to be implemented throughout Italy. It opens so that extraordinary season of projects and realizations that will contribute to the transformation of the Italian territory and the construction of modern identity of a nation working and proud.
It is primarily an architecture consisting of offices , residential quarters for employees and holiday villages , exhibitions, service stations and motels spread across the country and abroad, commissioned projects to some of the protagonists of the architectural debate of those years, called not to carry out individual projects , but to design prototypes , design and build new city landscapes.
Interventions at the conference and even more exhibition will present the most significant works produced by Eni , Mattei era up to the contests of '68 , exhibiting the original drawings and reproductions of Bacciocchi Mario , Marco and Ugo Bacigalupo Ratti, Dardi , Ignazio Gardella , Edoardo Gellner , Marcello Nizzoli and Mario Oliveri , Mario Ridolfi .

EniWAY . Architecture, art and cities
In the aftermath of the tragic attacks of Bascapé he died the founder of the institution hydrocarbons Italian Enrico Mattei was the opacity of deadly intrigue to prevail in the narrative of the contribution that the company had been offered to the process of modernization of our country. Witness that climate is the masterpiece of cinema documentary by Francesco Rosi , The Mattei .
It took nearly fifty years for exhibitions great and small, itinerant and sedentary , next to some conferences and many publications began to put focus on the role that Eni has had in changing the face of Italy from an agricultural country into an industrial power , in later years the Second World War - not only in economic terms through the development of an energy policy designed to bring out our country from a position of subservience to the countries of black gold holders - but also through the contribution of a specific company patron in the arts and the buyer except in the field of urban and architectural .
If you drive this commitment was a corporate communication strategy or a clear vision of the future of Italy Mattei and his think tank , as we would say today, or rather the interweaving of both factors, the question is not entirely settled. However, it raises the question , the extraordinary nature of that season also emerges through mass culture , thanks to the TV drama Enrico Mattei -the man who looked to the future in 2009.
So while , in this part of the twenty-first century , Italy seems to abdicate its industrial aspirations , even within the university project , the IUAV , it became important to retrace the steps of the twentieth century long tradition that has transformed our country , especially now that you can tap into the wealth of materials related to projects and realizations amassed in the private archives of the professionals kept in public institutions and research organizations , not for taste reminiscent , but to emphasize how , in a specific season , intellectual and creative next to industrial and open-minded visionaries were able to make the " Italian miracle " .
The results were not always in the most modest masterpieces and also marked the starting point of the attack on the landscape of the beautiful country .
The Iuav , which internally contains a large proportion of those archives , and among its teachers and researchers of projects includes several scholars , architects and artists of the constellation eni - because their teachers , Dardi and Carlo Scarpa, and students, Edward Gellner , were part of that constellation - mean by this convention and exhibition connected to it to make its own contribution , though partial and certainly not definitive, to the ongoing debate .
Both the conference and the exhibition are scanned in two parts with titles that do not overlap .
It is , in fact , moments with specific modes of communication between them that have the role of interweaving themes and issues in order to bring forth new interpretations for each user.
What with the event eniWay the Iuav intends to focus the approach is complex and non- approval status of the company in respect of the territories and contexts. Approach also made possible through the choice of its architects and artists , so if the conference through the titles of his sessions - the way of the modernization of the Italian territory : Agip and The eni eni after Mattei - inspired by a reconstruction chronology of events closely linked to the fortunes of the State , to give shape and coherence to the polyphony of planned interventions , the exhibition - in the two sections entitled Infrastructure and Settlements - favors exposure by types of interventions , along the boot , to tell the succession and overlapping of projects and realizations of the galaxy eni ; classroom Gino Valle in fact exposes the projects and achievements related to mobility infrastructure projects are exposed while in Archive projects of the settlements spread from north to south under the auspices of the dog six-legged .
Both the conference shows that the cross readings and other materials known to entirely new and valuable to the finding of the body of material on display was the collaboration with the Historical Archive of the eni , with the CSAC in Parma and with the Academy of St. Luke.

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