"'Fantasia degli italiani' as participatory utopia: Costantino Nivola's way to the synthesis of the arts"

The work of the sculptor, Costantino Nivola (1911-88) reflects the twofold nature of the 1950s Italian approach to the relationship between art and architecture in which the interest for applied decoration coexisted with the search for environmental expansion. Gio Ponti referred to both attitudes as equally acceptable manifestations of the ‘fantasia degli Italiani’, a somewhat innate capacity for creative freedom which he associated with the decorative projects of Piero Fornasetti as well as with Fontana’s spatialist experiments. Nivola’s work – seen by Ponti as another example of this disposition – en- compasses the two aspects of the “Italians’ fantasy”. Best known nowadays for his participation in the BBPR project of the Olivetti showroom in New York (1954), a widely acclaimed case of integration of architecture, art and design, Nivola came to international recognition in the 1950s as a “sculptor for architecture”; but at the same time he developed a more original ver- sion of the synthesis of the arts, one that, looking beyond the collaboration of architecture, painting and sculpture, centered on the environmental and social dimensions. Considering some largely forgotten projects, such as the garden of the artist’s house in Springs, designed with Bernard Rudofsky (1949-50), and the unrealized project for his hometown in Sardinia, Orani (1953), the paper analyzes Nivola’s utopian tendency to the aestheticization of the built environment. This approach – which might remind a contempo- rary observer of the recent trend of relational and participation art – co- existed with a more traditional, modernist vision influenced by the artist’s mentor and friend, Le Corbusier. The two perspectives seem to overlap in the 1958 exhibition organized in the streets of Orani with the involvement of the residents and, in a more indirect way, in Nivola’s collaboration with Eero Saarinen in the Morse and Stiles colleges at Yale University (1959-62).