Giovanni Michelucci

Michelucci's thesis was innovative but not accepted, this defeat heavily influencing his teaching at the Faculty of Architecture, where he was now Dean. In fact, in 1948, Michelucci left the Faculty in Florence, and became a professor at the Faculty of Engineering in Bologna, where he remained until the conclusion of his teaching activity and where he found a more fertile ground for the development of his themes.

The first turning point work after the war, a small church in the countryside of Pistoia, is a manifesto against the fashionable rhetoric and focused on the human dimension, using the language of rural architecture in order to restore the main religious and civil meeting center of a small and poor community, marking definitively the real role of architecture in the service of his idea of "The New City".

Many later works included social housing, workers' villages, public buildings, banks, churches, museum, social spaces for prisons, hospitals, schools and other projects, always developed around the idea of a friendly, supportive, democratic community-city, where architecture is open to the city, people-oriented and far from disciplinary boundaries of styles and languages.

Sadly leaving the university because of his age, he dedicated his work to rigorous research with which he prepared, singularly but not limited to, a new revolution in the language of architecture: the concept of space wherever accessible, variety, the refusal of formulaic and technocratic diagrams, a new relation between ancient and modern, which was also expressed through combining stones, bricks, concrete, steel, glass and new materials used architecturally, but mainly in a symbolic way.

During the '60s, with the church of San Giovanni Battista, Highway A11, called "Church of the Motorway", near Florence and the Church in the San Marino Republic, Michelucci fulfilled his earlier premises and completed his revolutionary designs, based on a search for the uniqueness between structure and architecture, with space developed as an architectural path.

In 1982 the architect, with Regione Toscana and the cities of Fiesole and Pistoia, decided to establish the "Fondazione Giovanni Michelucci" which he guided until his demise. He bequeathed his vision and values to the Foundation, that he wanted to be attentive to the social problems of the city and to the separate worlds of total institutions as prison, asylum, hospitals. He committed the Foundation to offering ideas and plans for action on the chronic urban question, how to reconnect separate spaces by a new design of the city, giving witness to a way of life and to making architecture meet the needs of the people. The Foundation now also conserves his archives, his works, his writings, his ideal heritage. The Michelucci Foundation was established to "contribute to research and study on city planning and modern and contemporary architecture, with a special attention to the problems regarding social facilities, hospitals, prisons, schools". Today, the Michelucci Foundation is a relevant and innovative actor in research and planning on social habitat and on the relationship between space and society. The Foundation coordinates several projects and researches in partnership with local authorities and cultural institutions, developing programs and proposals to integrate the local policies on the most relevant urban problems: migration, housing exclusion, suburbs, urban security, health.^[4]