MARIO BACCIOCCHI E L’IMMAGINE DELLO SVILUPPO

With the book Mario Bacciocchi, Stazioni di Servizio AGIP, 1952-1954, written by Antonio Labalestra and Tiziano De Venuto, the “letture di architettura” series entrusts an architectural historian and an architect with a different theme than those dealt with so far. Not a project narrated according to the series’ typical scheme, but a cornerstone of Italian infrastructural expansion. The experiment, fully successful, designs a prototype capable of supporting multiple variations without losing its character. The medium is an invariant: the cross-section. Each typological variation keeps it intact without affecting its charm and function. As a consequence, objects, touches, and light flowing between planes become actions that originate from the composition and experience that the architects of “modern Italian” had accumulated in previous decades. A nationwide message had to be launched, regardless of the degree of industrialisation. Enrico Mattei’s approach has always been naive. I still remember his interventions to lay the methane distribution network in historic centres using unauthorised night raids. By entrusting Bacciocchi, Mattei seeks a new approach to the emerging car industry branch. He does so through architecture, with a small object capable of reawakening, in the memory of most, the emotions, smells and noises of a semi-rural Italy that, thanks precisely to architecture, is changing. This book deals with this change by investigating the compositional interpretation of a small architectural miracle.