Raffaello Fagnoni and the School of Aeronautical Application—School of Air War in Florence Architecture of a Controversial and Damaged Past

Abstract

The growing and turbulent populism and the climate of renewed nationalism are today like a keloid on the skin, becoming a symbol of values ​​that should be rejected. It is not possible to look at the architecture of Raffaello Fagnoni's School of Aeronautical Application—School of Air Warfare, which also clearly affirms the traces of its past, without noticing its beauty. The School is one of the most relevant examples of Italian rationalism, which emerged ten years later than the rest of Europe, from the impetus of very young architects from the Milan Polytechnic. A “hidden” architecture of the city of exceptional value, hermetic in its need to defend itself from the outside, but of extraordinary beauty within the limits of its intimacy. An architectural complex of the fascist period for which, from the collaboration between the Department of Architecture of the University of Florence and the Institute of Aeronautical Military Sciences of the Italian Air Force, a research and documentation path was started, to investigate the historical value that this architecture of the thirties has by now unquestionably assumed. Through an accurate survey campaign with digital instruments, the research project analyzes the most famous work of Raffello Fagnoni, designed at the end of 1936, begun to build in 1937 to be completed only nine months later, in March 1938 [1]. The documentation of the work of the avant-garde movement has highlighted its development halfway between the logical and innovative language of the great European architects and the tradition of Italian classicism, enriching this information database with updated digital drawings. Italian architecture in the period between the two great wars was among the most active at the level of cultural experimentation, favored by the multiple constructive perspectives of the regime, encouraged by the innumerable commissions, by the requests of the privileged political hierarchies, and by Mussolini himself. Architecture on several occasions was a propaganda tool of the progressive totalitarian vocation of the fascist regime. A movement promoting artistic styles that were political and ethical but also of narration and representation of historical time, which redesigned the past limits, the future horizons, and the present borders of the nascent Fascist era. The project of the Air War school was born in this specific cultural area, of using architecture as a powerful means of conquering the masses, on which political success was based. Convincing the people of being safe under a strong leader and at the same time making Italy a great nation was the idea that moved the system.