Typology, Materials and Construction: Public Colonnaded Façades in Sicily from the Post-Unit Period to the Fascist Regime between Archaeological Reminiscences and Modernity

• Main Author: Domenica Sutera
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Università Mediterranea di Reggio Calabria 2020-07-01
• Series: ArcHistoR Architettura Storia Restauro - Architecture History Restoration
• Subjects: prospetti colonnati pubblici; sicilia; xviii-xx secolo; materiali; costruzione
• Online Access: http://pkp.unirc.it/ojs/index.php/archistor/article/view/595

The paper analyses the debate in Sicily on the construction of the monumental colonnaded porticoes that characterise the facades of public edifices built on the island from the post- Unification period to the Fascist regime. The pronao of the Massimo Theatre in Palermo (from 1875) marks the climax of a cultural movement, which, for almost a century, was to associate the neo-Greek style with public buildings and the material of choice of Sicily’s church building tradition in a deterministic manner. Calcarenite was used to build the peristyles of the temples of the archaic and classical age, with imposing, tapered and grooved columns consisting of overlapping sections. In the Fascist period, and in the age of reinforced concrete buildings, the construction of the Court House in Messina (from 1923) became a topic of discussion in the debate at national level. The subsequent use of local materials, some of which of more recent extraction and processing, together with reinforced concrete, contributed to distorting the “archaeological” style of the initial projects sponsored by local authorities, towards modern and abstract compositions, as in the case of the construction of the Post Office Building in Palermo (from 1933), or towards compromise solutions, as in the case of the Court House in Catania (from 1937). The solutions investigated in any case required engineering and technological advances to allow the buildings to achieve a new monumental scale.