SERGIO MUSMECI (1926-1981) is a relatively unheralded engineer-architect in the Italian mode. Like his more famous contemporary Pier Luigi Nervi, who designed the Palazzo dello Sport in Rome, Musmeci’s work carried the torch for a formally exuberant Modernism which began with Le Corbusier.
Thanks to a pedagogy which insists beautiful solutions are the goal of engineering — and to a construction industry which views concrete as intrinsically Italian, given that the Romans made concrete from volcanic ash, lime and seawater — the Italians kept the flame of grand gestures in concrete alive, even as Miesian uniformity morphed into the corporate modernism of the International Style in 1950s America.
