“Aspetti tipici” dell’architettura minore nei primi progetti di Luigi Vietti

In 1925 Luigi Vietti decided to move to Rome to attend to the classes of the Regia Scuola Superiore di Architettura. This fact strongly influenced his first professional assignments. Thanks to contacts established within academic circles, Vietti was introduced into the new cultural and political environment of the capital city. At the School of Rome, he studied new disciplines that enriched his professional training. Furthermore, Vietti was introduced to design themes in which he demonstrated a pronounced interest that was relevant in his profession. Academic lectures, as those of Gustavo Giovannoni and Marcello Piacentini, have aroused in Vietti the interest in spontaneous construction traditions. Piacentini, in particular, recognized that minor architectures were considered as a source of inspiration for modern American architects. Both in his lessons at the School of Rome and through the magazine Architettura e Arti decorative, he pinpointed many details of architecture that responded to practical human needs, which offered constructive but also formal models. Vietti has honed this lesson in a personal way. His approach emerged in his participation to the cultural debate and in his professional activity characterized by the study and the application of expressive use of vernacular details. In his references, Vietti identified both the rule of the composition of forms and functions and the constructive system. Many ‘typical aspects’ of minor architectures have been carefully studied and verified by him without excluding the possibility of a less orthodox reinterpretation of them. Vietti’s ability to compose architectural elements and invent constructive details to solve a technical problem emerged in the way he developed the spontaneous references and used some specific traditional materials and forms, since his first two residential buildings in Garbatella neighbourhood in Rome. In the following years, Vietti underwent a thorough and diversified development of vernacular details, introduced to contribute to the definition of the acclimatization and the spontaneous and informal characterization of his architectures.