Reweaving the city: the CIAM summer schools from London to Venice (1949–57)

To renew the professional practice of young architects after the Second World War, the 7th CIAM in Bergamo in 1949 comes to a conclusion with the decision to open professional studies to students and intensify international exchanges among newly graduated architects. In this climate of reform, there is the need to create an international summer school for students of the countries represented at the congress: a first edition took place in London in august. The First CIAM Summer school, coordinated by Maxwell Fry, is organized at the Architectural Association, directed by Robert Furneaux Jordan, with other English members of CIAM (the MARS Group) as tutors. Ernesto Nathan Rogers is invited to hold a seminar. The theme proposed by the course is the reconstruction of the city after the bombardments of the Second World War. Later, for two years the summer school is not established; Rogers then became the spokesman for the IUAV to organize the continuation of that experience in the Venice: from 1952 to 1957 the summer schools will be organized in Venice and directed by the architects of the Italian CIAM group Albini, Gardella, Samonà and Rogers himself. The paper intends to deepen the relationships between the members of the Italian CIAM group and the MARS Group in the organization of the summer schools in the light of the numerous episodes that attest to the intense relationships and exchanges between the two teams at the beginning of the Fifties: the exhibition Italian Contemporary Architecture, inaugurated in 1952 at RIBA, is undoubtedly one of the most relevant and explanatory. In the introductory text for the exhibition catalog, written by Furneaux Jordan, the reasons for the English interest for the most recent Italian architecture emerge. The materials found in the archives of Piero Bottoni, Enrico Peressutti, for a brief period also lecturer at the Architectural Association, Pietro Lingeri and Francesco Gnecchi- Ruscone, as well as the documents of Furneaux Jordan kept at the Architectural Association archive, and Patrick Crooke, allow to investigate the relations between the two groups and their different approach to the reconstruction of the cities destroyed by the war, of which the outcomes of the students' work in the schools clearly attest the differences.