Pier Luigi Nervi
About this ebook
PIER LUIGI NERVI was born in Sandrio, Italy, on June 21, 1891. He completed his formal studies at the civil engineering school of the University of Bologna in 1913. After graduating, he worked for the Società per Costruzioni Cementizie until 1920, receiving thorough experience in the design of reinforced concrete. In 1920 he formed the partnership of Soc. Ing. Nervi e Nebbiosi. During this association, which lasted until 1932, several noteworthy structures were built, especially the Florence Municipal Stadium. In 1932 he joined with a cousin to form Ingg. Nervi e Bartoli, the design and construction firm which he headed; the famous airplane hangars of 1938-1943, won by the firm in competition, brought Nervi international attention.
In the mid-1940s he developed the versatile material “Ferro-cementa,” a system of layers of fine steel mesh sprayed with cement mortar, which he used in the extraordinary Grand Salon of the Turin Exhibition Hall (1949). With this, building, Nervi became firmly established as one of the world’s foremost engineers, a reputation reinforced again and again by subsequent works, including the completion of three stadia for the 1960 Olympics in Rome.
A member of the International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM), he was also Professor of Technology and Construction Techniques at the University of Rome. He was awarded Gold Medals by the Institution of Structural Engineers in the UK, the American Institute of Architects (AIA Gold Medal 1964) and the RIBA. In 1957, he received the Frank P. Brown Medal of The Franklin Institute and the Wilhelm Exner Medal.
Pier Luigi Nervi died on January 9, 1979 at the age of 87.
About the author
Ada Louise Huxtable (née Landman; March 14, 1921 - January 7, 2013) was an architecture critic and writer on architecture. In 1970 she was awarded the first ever Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.
She was born in New York City in 1921, the daughter of Michael Landman, a physician and co-author (with his brother, Rabbi Isaac Landman) of the play A Man of Honor. She received an A. B. (magna cum laude) from Hunter College, CUNY in 1941. In 1942, she married industrial designer L. Garth Huxtable, and continued graduate study at New York University from 1942-1950. From 1950-1951 she spent one year in Italy on a scholarship of the U.S.-Italy Fulbright Commission.
She served as Curatorial Assistant for Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from 1946-1950. She was a contributing editor to Progressive Architecture and Art in America from 1950-1963 before being named the first architecture critic at The New York Times, a post she held from 1963-1982. She received grants from the Graham Foundation for a number of projects, including the book Will They Ever Finish Bruckner Boulevard? (1989). She was credited as one of the main forces behind the founding of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1965 and was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1974. She was the architecture critic for The Wall Street Journal, a position she took up in 1997.
She wrote over ten books on architecture, including Kicked A Building Lately? (1976); Architecture, Anyone? Cautionary Tales of the Building Art (1988); Goodbye History, Hello Hamburger: An Anthology of Architectural Delights and Disasters (1986); and The Tall Building Artistically Reconsidered: A History of the Skyscraper (1993). She also wrote a 2004 biography of Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959), a first generation Welsh-American architect.
Ms. Huxtable died in New York City in 2013, aged 91.
