Lezioni dagli archivi di architettura. Luoghi per il tempo libero del Novecento in Toscana

This volume collects the outcomes of the third cycle of the lecture series Lezioni dagli archivi di architettura ("Lessons from Architecture Archives"), promoted by the Archivia-Architettura project and held in the autumn of 2024. Taking as its starting point Foucault's notion of the "operative dimension" of the past, the project proposes a historical and analytical-design rereading of twentieth-century architecture based on an avowedly experimental method: the juxtaposition, on a single work, of two disciplinary perspectives — History of Architecture and Architectural and Urban Design — understood as complementary rather than mutually exclusive. The former investigates the reasons and circumstances behind a building's realisation; the latter, through the rereading and redrawing of project materials, offers a critical-interpretative account of the designer's compositional choices, with a view to their operative transmissibility. The field of enquiry is deliberately circumscribed to Tuscany, with particular attention to experiences beyond Florence, still marginal within national and international debate, and to largely unexplored archival holdings. The theme of this third cycle is places for leisure built between the 1920s and the second half of the century: fourteen monographic readings devoted to seven case studies, buildings at the service of the community that offer differing interpretations of the relationship between architecture and the urban or natural landscape. The contribution of doctoral candidates and early-career researchers from a range of Italian universities is treated as a methodological asset, for the plurality of approaches and critical outcomes it generates.