In 1954, Ada Louise Huxtable mounted an exhibition for New York’s Museum of Modern Art called The Modern Movement in Italy: Architecture and Design. “Italy’s outstanding contribution in the field of reinforced-concrete engineering is shown through the work of Pier Luigi Nervi,” read a press release for the show. Nervi had yet to build the Palazetto dello Sport, an indoor arena for the 1960 Rome Olympics that was the world’s largest reinforced-concrete dome when completed (and whose span-to-thickness ratio of 2,400:1 is, figuratively speaking, eggshell thin). The image of its striking ribbed ceiling played out on television screens across the globe, making Nervi an international celebrity at age 70.
Aside from Huxtable, who would write a short book about Nervi in 1960, only a few investigations have documented his work in English—despite having, in his later years, completed notable structures in North America, including the 48-story Tour de la Bourse (1964) in Montreal with Luigi Moretti, which was the tallest reinforced-concrete tower in the world until 1968; St. Mary’s Cathedral (1971) in San Francisco, with Pietro Belluschi, which has a dramatic, tentlike concrete roof; and the Scope Arena (1971) in Norfolk, Virginia, which remains the world’s largest reinforced thin-shell concrete dome.
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