The ingenious architectural and engineering work of Pier Luigi Nervi, the architect who used reinforced concrete in the most original way
From the first sketches until the final working drawings, the book contains a striking collection of pictures documenting the construction of one Nervi’s less studied works: the Italian Embassy in Brasilia.
This book surveys the different stages of the realization of the Italian Embassy in Brasilia, from 1969, when Pier Luigi Nervi was assigned this project by the minister Pietro Nenni, until 1979, the year of Nervi’s death. The introductory essay by Sergio Poretti describes the most important stages of Pier Luigi Nervi’s career, through the works that best represent his ability to invent and test structures and surfaces made of reinforced concrete.
About this material he said: “Being able to create a material similar to stone, which can assume any shape and is more resistant than the natural one, is something magic”.
For Nervi, reinforced concrete was not a codified building technique, but a strategy that could be continuously improved, enriched and reinvented. Every new work was the occasion to carry out a never-ending experimentation