Daniele Calabi and the projects for Padua

Daniele Calabi (1906 – 1964). Padua dedicates a widespread exhibition to the engineer-architect

At the end of the Second World Warafter spending several years in Brazil, Daniele Calabi he strongly desires to return to Italy and seeks new job opportunities to return to the country which, as a Jew fleeing the racial laws, he had had to leave in 1939. The year before, Calabi had been removed from public office, removed from the register of members of the professional association – “Jew deleted “, we read -, finally forced to abandon any possibility of “leading his own life”.

About ten years later, the feeling of nostalgia was revealed by Carlo Anti, rector of the University of Padua in the fascist era (between 1932 and 1943), who, having finished his mandate some time ago, in his diaries, on 12 November 1947, described the meeting with the architect and his wife, which took place during the couple’s exploratory trip to evaluate the possibilities of a definitive return: “Visit by Eng. Daniele Calabi with his bride, Ornella, Carlo Foà’s daughter. They come from Brazil, sick with nostalgia for Italy. Calabi is a man of great intelligence: I describe to him the inauguration of the Asiago observatory, built to his design and I am moved. That institute will always remain my favorite creature”. A story that reveals the dramatic effects of collective history on relationships between human beings and the profound contradictions of a dark and complex historical period: in 1938, in the context of the actions carried out against the Jews, Calabi was removed from his duties and from Padua precisely during Anti’s rectorship; ten years later, upon returning to Italy, it was Anti himself who offered him concrete job opportunities in the city and showed him esteem, already previously defining him as a “very solid technician and refined architect”.

In 1949 Calabi definitively left Brazil, boarded the ship Toscanelli with his wife and children and returned to Italy. It is in Varese, Milan and Padua. Return therefore to the cities of the University studies – a degree in engineering in Padua in 1928 and one in architecture in Milan in 1930 – and projects left unfinished or forcibly without signature, such as the construction site of the Asiago Astrophysical Observatory (1936-1938) of which, in 1942, he had not seen the inauguration because, in fact, he was in exile in Brazil.

Service by Francesca Boccaletto and Massimo Pistore

Born in Verona, in his youth Daniele Calabi (1906 – 1964) lived and worked between Milan, Padua and Paris, before moving to Sao Paulo in Brazil, an obligatory choice that caused him great suffering. Finally returning to Italy, he again chooses Milan and Padua, finally the Lido of Venice, where he moved in 1962 and where he designed and built his last home-studio.

Now, on the occasion of sixty years after his death, Padua presents a widespread exhibition entirely dedicated to him: an in-depth investigation of the architectural and urban context of the city after the Second World War which, starting from a focus on the projects of the 1950sfocuses on specific themes developed in the spaces of Ca’ Lando and along the Liston, with the aim of encouraging reflection on the living relationship between architecture and urban context and offering the opportunity for a spontaneous exploration of a little-known history.

The exhibition (which is also a book) Daniele Calabi in Padua. The architect and the city after the Second World War, set up at Palazzo del Monte di Pietà, in Padua, from 19 May to 21 July, is organized by the Barbara Cappochin Foundation, for the twenty years of the International Architecture Biennial, with the departments of Cultural Heritage and Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering of the the University of Padua, and the contribution of the Cariparo Foundation. The curators are Elena Svalduz and Stefano Zaggia, teachers of History of Architecture respectively to the Department of Cultural Heritage and the Icea Department of the University of Padua. The exhibition itinerary with technical and executive drawings, sketches, photographs, panels with reproductions, elaborations of historical materials and a multimedia device, curated by camerAnebbia, allows you to “enter” the human and professional story of the engineer-architect and offers an interesting ( re)reading of the architecture created and still present in the city, told by the photographs of the present Alessandra Chemollo.

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Daniele Calabi, an architect fleeing from racial laws

Daniele Calabi, 1923 and Calabi student file from 1926, Archive of the University of Padua

Conceived as a journey of discovery of the works designed between 1950 and 1960 for a city in transformation, the exhibition opens with a focus on the 1950s and closes with a second room dedicated to the years of youth between studies, training in the field, the first professional activity and the abrupt interruption of his career and life in Italy.

Padua represents “a place of connection in Calabi’s lifewhere it is possible to summarize his work”, writes the architecture historian Martina Massaro in the book that accompanies the exhibition. And it is true, because “this is inevitably the city where the greatest concentration of works created remains, in addition to that remained on paper, in the project state, both of the first phase of the professional activity and of the mature period, when he returns strengthened by the experience gained in Brazil”.

From the analysis of the many works the signature emerges, the red thread that runs through Calabi’s work and researchduring the first years, in the Brazilian parenthesis and in the second Italian period: the use of brickwith the wall textures, the patio solution, tested in Brazil and brought to Padua, to create a dialogue between the interiors of the house and the natural element, and the particular attention to the views, in constant relationship with the city.

Daniele Calabi – project of a house in Brazil, 1946

Careful research has made it possible to identify the fundamental projects carried out for the city: from the pediatric clinic to the condominiums, from the Alicorno houses to those for teachers. For Svalduz and Zaggia, we read in the introduction to the essay, “the extensive exploration of various archives has brought to light mostly unpublished documentation which has allowed us to review not only the genesis but also the chronology of the works, […] materials that were thought to be completely lost or missing from the architect’s archival collections: sketches, design schemes, planimetric studies found especially in the General Archives of the University of Padua”.

In 1950 Calabi resumed contact with Carlo Anti and it was the former rector who proposed to him the project of the houses for teachers for the public education employees building cooperative and the multi-storey building between via Falloppio (the house in the tree) and via sant ‘Eufemia is the one who, more than anyone else, displays his signature. Between 1951 and 1952, hired as a professional collaborator in the Technical Office and the University Building Consortium, both directed by Giulio Brunetta, Calabi wanted to return to work on some projects left pending, including that for the hospital area. In 1952 his friend Luigi Piccinato began to draw up the general master plan of Padua and it is in this context of turmoil and changes that the opportunities for new assignments multiplied: Calabi chooses to settle in the city, designing a house for himself and his family in Alicorno, neighborhood that hosts houses that represent the perfect synthesis of its language and a vision of low-density architecture.

The 1950s in Padua were full of opportunities: He works for private clients, such as the doctor Galeno Ceccarelli, Bruno Lattes, Alfredo Zuccari and Michelangelo Romanin Jacur, and collaborates with Gaetano Zamperoni and Antonio Salce for Euganea Costruzioni, for which he built the multi-storey building in Via Vescovado. In 1955 he designed and built the condominium in via Gaspara Stampa and the Igea hotel with the apartment house between via Ospedale and via Gabelli. His commitment to the professors’ homes led him to create, together with Brunetta, the house in via Pio which, in the exhibition, you can admire a small canvas by Fulvio Pendini from 1953). In this context, the projects for the clinics for the university matured, which Calabi developed in collaboration with the engineer Brunetta, with whom he subsequently interrupted relations precisely as part of the new works for the hospital.

Apartment building in via Vescovado. Photo: Alessandra Chemollo

In addition to the installation at Palazzo del Monte di Pietà, the widespread exhibition is offered as the result of a living laboratory “of doing”, proposed by Ca’ Lando project, and as an opportunity for dialogue with the city. On the Liston, between the Town Hall and Palazzo del Bo, an installation with several tables shows images that tell stories of wall textures, a distinctive signature of Calabi’s work. While Ca ‘Lando, in via Gabelli, a stone’s throw from the “his” hotel Igea, hosts The Brazilian house in Pavilion e The jealous walls. It is a concrete, “constructed”, tactile installation, supervised by Edward Narne, professor of architectural design at Dicea and guide for students active at Ca’ Lando, and the collaboration of Fornace Sant’Anselmo di Loreggia. A contemporary restitution and reinterpretation of the architectural characteristics of the engineer-architect’s works. Narne explains to The Bo Live and he tells it well in the pages of the book dedicated to Calabi: “We wanted to enhance his favorite building material, that brick with precise dimensions (6×12, 5×26 centimeters), characterized by equally well-defined shades, vibrant between pink and ‘ocher. We meet him in all the various works in Padua, the protagonist in those same construction frameworks, capable of setting up a timely and precise comparison with the various adjacent historical pre-existences”.

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