Nervi Foresees Future: 'Spacious Architecture'

In the conclusion to his Charles Eliot Norton lectures, Pier Luigi Nervi last night looked into the future to a "vast and spacious architecture" constructed a strict obedience to physical law while maintaining an intrinsic appeal to man's aesthetic sense.

To prepare architects for this development, Nervi called on education in his profession to aim at giving its students "clear general ideas and a profound conceptual knowledge of all laws of physics and economics."

Public buildings such as entertainment halls, skyscrapers, and transportation Terminals, Nervi predicted, will progressively increase in size. As dimensions increase, static laws increasingly determine shape until "for structures of huge dimensions, obedience to them is compulsory."

The technical correctness of shapes imposed by physical law, Nervi maintained, constitutes the essential element of the the "'style of truth'" to which man's aesthetic sense instinctively responds.

"I think that it is very difficult to explain the reason for our immediate approval of forms which come to us from the physical world," Nervi said. "I think, however, that without question we are pleased and moved by these forms."

To demonstrate this point, Nervi used slides illustrating the evolution of the automobile, the airplane, and the locomotive. Early imaginative conceptions of the airplane designed without regard to physics, he pointed out, were grotesque "fantasies" with no common design. On the other hand, the shape of the modern airplane, determined by the principles of aerodynamics, is not only common to all airplanes, but is also aesthetically pleasing.

Nervi maintained that the basic uniformity of shape imposed on architecture by static law will run the risk of becoming "fatal monotony." "Binding as technical demands may be," he declared, there always remains a margin of freedom sufficient to show the personality if its creator and, if he be an artist, to flow his work, even in its strict technical obedience, to become a real and true work of art."

'Irrational Formalism'

But, Nervi argued, "all true solutions are those of maximum efficiency." At short distances strict adherence to physical law is not obligatory, but nevertheless it will achieve "conditions of maximum efficiency and of the best use of materials."

It is, therefore, toward the goal of economic efficiency that architecture must educate its students, and not toward the "too wide-spread illogical formalism" which regards architecture only as a "decorative fact."

"Students," Nervi claimed, "must be divorced from the too-widespread tendency, if not outright and persistent mental habit, which leads them to consider a drawing as an architectural fact."

Therefore, in its education architecture must aim at giving its students "a more complete technical sense based on the constant search for economic efficiency." The architect must have a "sense of constructional reality" to recognize the conditions any project must fulfill and the ability to devise the means to fulfill the conditions.

In order to gain these, Nervi concluded, the architect must have a fundamental conceptual grasp of all the technical fields he supervises. "It is certainly very difficult to achieve this vast, general synthetic preparation," he claimed, "but it is just this difficulty which renders the architect's profession so elevated."