One of the great builders of the twentieth century, like Le Corbusier or Wright, who found himself handling the future
Marcello D’Olivo was a genius. It is useless to go around it, there is too much evidence not to call things with their sacred name: it had a Leonardo (or Michelangelo, depending on your taste), which made it unique in the panorama of twentieth century architecture, national and international.
Certain architect (builder as he liked to define himself, very concretely, it has always given me to think about the fact that in English concrete means both concrete and concrete), but also a very fine designer (in the book published by Rusconi Ecotown Ecoway there are wonderful drawings with a beautiful warm and enveloping stroke, and it is a book that is still found with some ease online); philosopher (the reflections contained in Discourse for another architecture, a highly coveted book by bibliophiles); traveler (all over the world, from Canberra to Toronto, from Baghdad to Cairo, without neglecting the micro, from Opicina to Gargano, from Buja to Sirmione), rather than an authentic explorer traveler, in unknown lands (even here, among the first to understand the centrality of Africa); one who gave a voice to great literature, Italian (the friendship with another genius, the poet Leonardo Sinisgalli), and international (the acquaintance of Ernest Hemingway).
An icon himself, the pipe perpetually in his mouth, the wide-brimmed hat on his head, the brisk and bold ways of those who are bigger than life itself (an English saying that fits perfectly to D’Olivo: bigger than life). In the fifties of the last century he had intuited some of the cornerstones of the next coming century, the twenty-first. D’Olivo found himself wielding the future – which, as we know, is incandescent, burning, perilous matter. The problem was not what to build, but how to build it. The thing was obviously the house – in all its possible variants, villa, condominium, shop, neighborhood, city, even a whole city, without it man is not man, we are sapiens sapiens but we should also add habitans habitans. So what really mattered was how. And the how led to where everything is born, where we are born: Nature (the capital letter of respect is absolutely necessary). That Nature which in recent weeks – with the storms, the fires, the ever higher temperatures – is sending the last (perhaps) desperate signals of an irreversible decline, which had to be faced precisely in those 1950s when D’Olivo began to operate . Instead we know how it went: unbridled building speculation, wild overbuilding, total ignorance of true priorities.
Today ecology is among the priorities, D’Olivo had understood it half a century in advance – a personal memory now re-emerges, dating back to the eighties and nineties of the last century: the pitying smiles addressed to those who tried to respect Nature , do not consume soil, try a first separate collection, a different lifestyle. Practices dismissed then as vain whims. For decades we slept, and now the results are there for all to see. Greta Thunberg herself is the daughter of D’Olivo’s ideas – she doesn’t know it, but that’s the way it is, maybe let’s make her aware with a tweet. Ideas that in the case of Lignano Pineta D’Olivo managed to realize: to say, the brilliant idea of having a treasure of fifty trees for each house (it was not always like this, but it was a very strong indication, demanding but necessary, however possible if desired), curving the streets to slow down road traffic and regulate traffic, concentrating services in a single place that can be easily reached on foot.
D’Olivo was indeed a visionary, decades ahead of all the others (a fortune and a disgrace at the same time – as a colleague of Hemingway, Truman Capote, said: “When God gives you a gift, he also gives you a whip”), but he was not a mona (allow me a colorful language because I think he would have liked, he bigger than life), a cloudcatcher, on the contrary he had a strong sense of reality, he was very well versed in structural calculations, he scrupulously followed every phase of the project: he was, as Bruno Zevi said, a practical and solid “peasant architect”. But like all peasants also a great dreamer. Only the strange cases of life – in a nutshell: lack of courage on the part of the clients, for the most part – have meant that many innovative projects remained on the graph paper, unfinished. But a quick glance at one of these projects (you are spoiled for choice: the tree city, the donut city, the Uccellaccio, the Mi-To) is enough to understand one thing: Marcello D’Olivo is on a par with great of the twentieth century, it has nothing less than Le Corbusier or Wright. On the contrary.
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