L’Abitare collettivo: sperimentazioni e progetti degli anni ‘50 e ‘60 tra New Empiricism e Carta dell’Habitat

The topic of housing, understood as grouping of social housing or as construction of “bourgeois” apartment buildings, in recent decades has seen a constant renewal of perspectives related to urban newly-built projects, to the recovery of brownfields and of course to the recovery of existing buildings. Following the creeping economic crisis, which has affected most of the advanced economies for almost a decade, the theme of house has taken again a central role in the discipline of architectural design and in the urban and social development planning policies. This dissertation, therefore, aims to investigate what happened, especially in Europe, in the two decades after the end of the Second World War. This period of strong revision of the concepts and theories of dwelling in different disciplinary environments and the consequent need of social and urban reconstruction, urged designers, theorists, philosophers to question themselves again about principles of dwelling, with all the implications that this new reflection generated. Among the Fifties and Sixties and the present day there are many similarities, especially in the economic and social fields. Research on collective housing project, that has been a central theme of the contemporary architecture since the early 2000s, reinterprets many of the trials of those years, rediscovering the inhabitant as a thinking man and not as a number. This research work, therefore, wants to: understand what are today the design actions focused on collective housing and on shared living that can affect the architectural and social renewal of the contemporary urban palimpsest and that reinterpret the models of the ‘50s and ‘60s; to investigate the experimental and greatly distinguishing examples, that belong to a historical period that will still probably need a historical gap to be better understood and absorbed; to analyze changes and transformations relating to the theme of collective dwelling, that occurred since the end of the Forties, through the Fifties to get to the Sixties; to find in the models of the ‘50s and ‘60s current references capable of returning an architecture closer to the perception of the space of the so-called “man in the street” that in 1949 was considered by James Maude Richards as first recipient of architectural production.