Throughout the 1960s and the 1970s, some European architectural magazines illustrated the Trombe Wall: a solar collector designed by engineer Felix Trombe, integrated into the southern wall of some housing prototypes by Jacques Michel in France. Magazines such as Architectural Design, Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, Technique et Arquitecture, Casabella and Domus, illustrated these examples especially during the years before and after the 1973 oil crisis. However, they mainly focussed on the technological aspects of the innovation and on energy performances. Taking as a reference the concept of Equipoise described by Sigfried Giedion (1948) and re-considered within the sustainability debate by William Braham,1 the technological interventions of sustainable architectural practices entail three limitations. The first underlines that the interventions could affect the health of the people, the second that sustainability is ultimately a social condition and the third regarded the necessity of regular maintenance and renewal. This article aims to highlight the absence of debate about the three cautions in the magazines throughout the 1970s and the consequence of this lack on sustainable and energy-efficient architecture of today.@en

Zuccaro Marchi L., Medici P., Romani A., Covatta A., Neu Ulm. “Neu Ulm. Das Productive Herz,” Bauwelt n. 1 (2018): 22.@en

The article analyses the discourse of CIAM 8, which was held in 1951 at Hoddesdon and it dealt with the topic of the Heart of the city. This latter was conceived as a Constituent Element at the basement of the urban structure, dealing with right balance between the private and the public spheres. The target of the article is to illuminate and compare these still overlooked multidisciplinary positions about the private hearth and public heart. It offers a better insight in the central role that these notions played in architectural culture within CIAM but also in the wider discussions on the contemporary built environment. In particular the article analyses the case study of the Pioneer Health Centre, in Peckham (UK), a single mega-architectural building hosting a new community of 800-900 households with health problems. This sort of 20th Century Health Phalanstery was praised at CIAM 8 as a the common “Heart”, as a “place that serves as a bridge between private life and community life”, [...a] place where human contacts between man and man can again be built.@en

The Heart of the City concept, which was introduced at CIAM 8 in 1951, has played an important role in architectural and urban debates. The Heart became the most important of the organic references used in the 1950s for defining a theory of urban form. This book focuses on both the historical and theoretical reinterpretation of this seminal concept. Divided into two main sections, both looking at differing ways in which the Heart has influenced more recent urban thinking, it illustrates the continuity and the complexities of the Heart of the City. In doing so, this book offers a new perspective on the significance of public space and shows how The Heart of the City still resonates closely with contemporary debates about centrality, identity and the design of public space. It would be of interest to architects, academics and students of urban design and planning.@en

Winner Europan 14, "The Productive Heart of Neu Ulm" Architects: Leonardo Zuccaro Marchi (IT), Piero Medici (IT), Alice Covatta (IT), Annalisa Romani (IT) Contributors: Agnieszka Batkiewicz (PL), Christian Maijstre (NL), Virginia Santilli (IT), Yağız Söylev (TR), Xiaoyi Qin (CN)@en

Victor Gruen is the pioneer of the regional shopping centre, he is the “Mall Maker”, which, is also the title of a book by M. Jeffrey Hartwick about this Austrian-born architect. Well known for his first commercial projects, which have been copied and analysed worldwide, mostly negatively influencing the structure of cities and societies, Gruen had focused his attention on the importance of the environmental crisis in his both theoretical writings and projects as early as the 1960s. How can Gruen be personified as both the “Mall Maker” and the “Architect of the Environment’? In the early 1970s Gruen presented Die Charta von Wien, as an attempt to readapt the CIAM`s Charte d`Athenes to the contemporary conditions, with a brand new emphasis on the ecological environment as well. This paper will deal mainly with these contradictions and synergies between “consumeristic” architecture and its role in the city in relation to the environmental issues posed by its inventor. The complexity of the connections between consumerism and ecology and the references to CIAM and Gruen, appear to be important themes for a discussion on public space and our contemporary urban condition.@en

The “Heart of the City”, title of the 8th CIAM held in 1951, is a contradictory and pervasive figure of speech which has marked a thinking and urban transition after the Second World War. In 1951, two opposite urban conditions are considered by Sert, President of CIAM, as main issues which the discourse on the Heart should face: the disappearance of city centres because of the destruction of war and the negation of urban centrality due to urban sprawl and the constant enlargement of city boundaries ad infinitum. However, the Heart itself also represents two different figures of speech, the symbol and the metaphor. On the one side it becomes a humanist symbol ‘which springs directly to the senses without explanation’, as stressed by Giedion during CIAM 8; on the other, the Heart retains its anatomical and metaphorical organic meaning though translated into the presumed correct physical form and dimension of the city. Analyzing the CIAM 8, the paper investigates these Post-war urban tensions, which lie at the crossroads of intellectual-theoretical and architectural-design worlds. The aim of the paper is to analyze and re-interpret these complex theoretical layers of significance of the Heart between reconstruction and recentralization within the Modern Movement in the 1950s.@en

Lippiello A., Zuccaro Marchi L., “Floating Blocks,” in Europan, Europan 11 Results, (Paris: Europan Europe ed., 2012), 12. (ISBN 978-2-914296-22-9)@en

Lippiello A., Zuccaro Marchi L., “Runner-up. Floating Blocks,” in Europan, Europan 11, in the Netherlands. (Amsterdam: SUN, 2012), 103-105. (ISBN 978-94-6105-8737)@en