Pier Luigi Nervi

Pier Luigi Nervi (Sondrio, 21 June 1891 – Rome, 9 January 1979) was an Italian engineer, entrepreneur and academic, specialized in civil construction.
He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the author of some great works. He collaborated with internationally renowned architects, including Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn.

PLNervi possessed the audacity of an engineer, the imagination of an architect and the concreteness of an entrepreneur.

It was the opportunities offered by having a company that allowed him to carry out almost all of his most important projects on his own, “turnkey”, personally intervening in every phase of the construction process, from the very first drawing to the last brick.

Born in Sondrio to Ligurian parents, due to his father's job (postmaster) during his childhood he was forced to change residence several times. He enrolled in the faculty of engineering at the University of Bologna, graduating in 1913. Soon after he found work in the technical office of the Società per Costruzioni Cementizie in Bologna; here he trained professionally, studying the problems of every type of structure. During the First World War he served in the military engineers.

In 1923 he founded his first company in Rome, the construction company Ing. Nervi e Nebbiosi, which in 1932 became Nervi e Bartoli.
In 1924 he married Irene Calosi, with whom he had four children. Three of them would work alongside him, while the fourth, Carlo Nervi, would be an oncologist in Rome.

The first structure he built, the Bridge over the Cecina River in the municipality of Pomarance (PI) dates back to 1920. In 1925 he built the reinforced concrete roof with a mobile opening and the gallery of the Politeama Pratese theatre in Prato. The Augusteo Theatre in Naples was built between 1926 and 1927, but the first work to arouse international interest was the “Berta” stadium in Florence Campo di Marte (later known as the Artemio Franchi Stadium) with its particular spiral staircases and the famous Maratona Tower. The competition for the work was held in 1930 and his project was judged the best for its structural refinement, the impact of the totally exposed structures and the attention to containing construction costs.

Nervi continues his research in the development of constructions also with programmatic projects and studies. Thus in 1932 he exhibits in Florence the study for a floating hotel designed together with the architect Rubens Magnani. The hotel (not built) has 16 rooms and is conceived as a typical place of stay to be anchored offshore near marine cities. Being designed for the inhabitants of these cities who do not have the possibility of absenting themselves from their place of residence for a holiday, the idea also contains an original functional aspect that further highlights Nervi's multifaceted research.

The same attention to technical and economic control also made the projects for hangars, built on behalf of the Italian Royal Air Force, successful. The hangars were generally built of wood or metal, but at the time these materials were precious and were destined for war production. The famous “gallery hangars” built on the island of Pantelleria are still visible. Applying innovative solutions in the design of the large roof vaults, characterized by crossed concrete arches, between 1935 and 1943 he built two of the four hangars of the Orbetello seaplane base, the two of the Marsala seaplane base and the four of the Castel Viscardo/Orvieto airport, using the futuristic and elegant “geodesic” structure. These creations allowed the number of support points to be reduced, considerably increasing the internal spaces intended to accommodate the aircraft. Nothing remains of the buildings of Orvieto and Orbetello, destroyed by the retreating Germans at the end of the last conflict; On the other hand, the contemporary hangars he built at the Marsala seaplane base and at the Pantelleria airport in Sicily are in a good state of preservation.
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