Brutalist Italy. Concrete Architecture from the Alps to the Mediterranean Sea

Architectural photographers Roberto Conte and Stefano Perego (authors of Soviet Asia) have spent the past five years travelling over 20,000 kilometres documenting the monumental concrete structures of their native country.

Brutalism – with its minimalist aesthetic, favouring raw materials and structural elements over decorative design – has a complex relationship with Italian history. After World War II, Italian architects were keen to distance themselves from fascism, without rejecting the architectural modernism that had flourished during that era. They developed a form of contemporary architecture that engaged with traditional methods and materials, drawing on uncontaminated historical references. This plurality of pasts assimilated into new constructions is a recurring feature of the country’s Brutalist buildings, imparting to them a unique identity.

With an introduction by Adrian Forty, The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London.

Reviews

FT Best books of 2023 — Architecture & Design

We know Italy for Roman ruins, the Renaissance, Venetian exoticism — every architectural style except Brutalism, it sometimes seems. But this little book is full of wildly inventive, sculptural buildings by architects who have escaped the classical legacy of fascism and the ubiquity of the historic.

"Brutalist Italy captures the emancipation of concrete in Italian architecture.

The book by Stefano Perego and Roberto Conte chronicles a side of Italian architecture that was “built and tested – with courage, perhaps with madness, often in the pursuit of utopia”". - Stir World