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Dynamited by the retreating Germans in 1944, all of the hangars were reduced to rubble. Recalls Nervi's son Vittorio (three of his four sons work with their father): "He wanted to crawl under those hangars and die with them." Instead, Nervi traveled to inspect the ruins on the spot, came back satisfied on one point: he discovered that the joints, made of welded rods buried in concrete, had withstood the explosions, thus proved to be the strongest element in the building.
The series of postwar structures that have skyrocketed Nervi's fame began with a new exhibition hall in Turin. Strapped for money and materials, as usual, Nervi used his newly developed ferro-cement, composed of high-grade concrete applied in layers over a mesh of thin steel wires. By corrugating the roof to gain added strength and designing it in prefabricated sections, including skylights (see opposite), he produced a building that cost only $500,000, has one of the largest unpillared roofs in Europe.
Flowing Stone. To overcome the rough surface of concrete, Nervi casts his prefab sections in smooth plaster casts, gets a satiny surface so elegant that it has been used unadorned in restaurants and expensive spas. An important test of bare concrete as a building material will come with UNESCO's now abuilding $7,000,000 Paris headquarters, designed by Nervi, U.S. Architect Marcel Breuer and France's Bernard Zerhfus (TIME, May 25, 1953). To combat the tendency of concrete to age poorly, Nervi this time is adding water-repellent silicones to seal out the moistures, hopes to obtain a surface as lasting as granite.
Pier Nervi at work with concrete (he calls it "stone in motion") is like an Indian fakir with a rope—he makes it twirl and gyrate of itself. Using his ferroconcrete, he built a 38-ft. ketch for himself, with a hull ½ in. thick, found that it sailed beautifully, was sturdy, watertight and needed no maintenance.
Long hailed at home, Nervi now has a reputation that is worldwide. Earlier this year the select American Academy and National Institute of Arts and Letters elected him an honorary member, cited him as "one of the world's most renowned architects." Last month Philadelphia's Franklin Institute awarded Nervi its Frank P. Brown Medal. This month The Works of Pier Luigi Nervi, by Italian Architect Ernesto Rogers (Praeger, $10) will be published in the U.S.
Nervi feels that he is pointing toward the means of achieving a whole new architecture that will break with squared blocks and perpendicular girders. "Concrete," he says, "is a living creature which can adapt itself to any form, any need, any stress."