Bruno Zevi was an Italian architect, historian, professor, curator, author, and editor. Zevi was a vocal critic of "classicizing" modern architecture and postmodernism.
In 1944, he founded the influential Association for Organic Architecture. The following year the magazine Metron-architecture reviewed his book Towards an Organic Architecture, which brought him international acclaim.
From 1955 onwards, he wrote a column for the weekly L'Espresso magazine. He was an active member of the Italian Jewish community, and took part in anti-fascist activities within the Giustizia e Libertà movement. He was active in the Action Party and later in Popular Unity and in the Radical Party, which he represented in the Chamber of Deputies from 1987 to 1992. From 1954 until his death in 2000 he was editor of his own magazine L'architettura. Cronache e storia. The Modern Language of Architecture is one of Zevi’s most significant publications. In this book Zevi sets forth seven principles or “antirules” to codify the language of architecture created by Le Corbusier, Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Wright. In place of the classical language of the Beaux Art school, with its focus on abstract principles of order, proportion, and symmetry, he presents an alternative system of communication characterized by a free interpretation of contents and function, an emphasis on difference and dissonance, a dynamic of multidimensional vision, and independent interplay of elements, an organic marriage of engineering and design, a concept of living spaces that are designed for use, and an integration of buildings into their surroundings. Anticipating the innovations of postmodern architecture, Zevi argues forcefully for complexity and against unity, for decomposition dialogue between architecture and historiography, finding elements of the modern language of architecture throughout history, and discussing the process of architectural innovation.
Architecture as space
Zevi argued in Saper Vedere L'Architettura that space is essential for both the definition and appreciation of architecture.
Modern architecture movement
Zevi participated in the influential International Architecture Symposium "Mensch und Raum" at the Vienna University of Technology in 1984, also attended by Justus Dahinden, Ernst Gisel, Jorge Glusberg, Otto Kapfinger, Frei Otto, Ionel Schein, Dennis Sharp, Paolo Soleri, and Pierre Vago. Such was Zevi's uncompromising critique of any tendency in modern architecture towards classicism that he even would criticize those architects he otherwise admired: "When Gropius, Mies and Aalto produced it was an act of surrender. Lacking a modern code, they weakened and regressed to the familiar womb of classicism.".
Quotes
"In 1973, Zevi set out ideas as a set of invariants - a sort of anti-classical codebook that attempted to define modernity as a language of asymmetry and dissonance, which he propagated via his magazine L'architettura, cronache e storia. This exciting theory of architecture as rupture and fragmentation marks him out as the seminal theoretician for all currents of modernism interested in iconoclasm and deconstruction, from Alvar Aalto in the 1930s to Daniel Libeskind in the 1990s."
