PIER LUIGI NERVI – BAUTEN UND PROJEKTE
Ernesto N. Rogers, Max Huber [Designer]
Ernesto N. Rogers: PIER LUIGI NERVI – BAUTEN UND PROJEKTE. Teufen AR: Verlaf Arthur Niggli 1957. First edition. Text in German. Oblong quarto. Photo illustrated dust jacket. Textured tan cloth decorated in red. Red endpapers. 142 pp. Fully illustrated in black and white. Dust jacket and book design by Max Huber. Colorful jacket lightly edgeworn with a couple of tiny chips. Textblock pages lightly sunned along top edge. Interior unmarked and clean. Out-of-print. A very good or better copy in a very good or better dust jacket.
11 x 9 hard cover book with 142 pages and approx. 250 black and white drawings and photographs. Includes a preface by Pier Luigi Nervi, explanatory notes to illustrations by Jurgen Joedicke and "A portrait of Nervi" written by Ernesto Rogers.
Translate from the book: "Pier Luigi Nervi is unquestionably the greatest master of concrete construction of our age. Engineer, architect, contractor – his buildings of the past thirty years take their place in the tradition of Europe's finest engineering architecture, related in spirit to the work of Freyssinet, Perret and Maillart."
“Here are all of his completed works, dramatically illustrated and described in detail. Among them are the stadium in Florence, finished early in the thirties, with its audacious cantilevered grandstand roof, the hangars of Ortobello [1940] poised miraculously on six slender supports, the famous exhibition halls at Turin [late 1940s] with their magnificient roofs, numerous industrial buildings whose construction represented entirely new departures, and the UNESCO building in Paris designed in collaboration with Breuer and Zehrfuss. The book also includes a number of designs for projects not yet constructed, such as a stadium for 150,000 spectators in Rio de Janeiro, hangars, factories, and railway stations."
Italian architect and engineer Pier Luigi Nervi (1891 - 1979) was renowned for his brilliance as a structural engineer and his novel use of reinforced concrete.
This volume includes the Stadio Artemio Franchi in Florence (1931), Exhibition Building, in Turin, Italy, (1949), UNESCO headquarters in Paris (1950) (collaborating with Marcel Breuer and others), and others.
Max Huber (1919-1992) moved to Milan in order to avoid being drafted into the Swiss army. He worked for Studio Boggeri until Italy joined the war in 1941, forcing Huber to return to his home country where he collaborated with Werner Bischof and Emil Schultness on the influential art magazine 'Du.' As a member of the art group Allianz he exhibits his abstract artwork at the Kunsthaus Zurich with Max Bill, Leo Leuppi, Richard Lohse and Camille Graeser.
After the war Huber returned to Milan where he rubbed shoulders with the postwar Italian intelligentsia [Cesare Pavese, Natalia Ginzburg, Elio Vittorini, Franco Fortini, Ettore Sottsass, Achille Castiglioni and Albe Steiner] all who shared the belief that design had the capacity to restore the human values misplaced during the war.
From 1950 to 1954 Huber worked for the department store La Rinascente, also known as "Elle Erre", the time Albert Steiner was art director of their Advertising Office. The two also worked on the VIII Triennale di Milano. With Achille Castiglioni he designed large-scale installations for RAI, Eni and Montecatini. In 1954 Huber was awarded the prestigious Compasso dπOro and in 1958 he travels to the US as a speaker to the First International Seminar on Typography (New York Art Directors Club).
In 1965 the Nippon Design Committee organized an exhibition of Huber's work at Matsuya Design Gallery in Tokyo. This trip established close ties with Japan that culminated with his marriage to the artist and illustrator Aoi Kono. Kono was instrumental in the development of m.a.x.museo, a museum dedicated to his name and preserving his personal archive, that opened in Chiasso in 2005.