The utopia of Reality. Realisms in Twentieth Century Architecture and beyond

The notion of realism, which appeared in the theoretical debate on the architecture in the early Thirties of the Twentieth Century, when the “realistic” assumptions proposed on the occasion of the first congress of soviet writers in Moscow in 1934 were claimed as the “official” creative method and were subsequently adopted by all artistic disciplines, appears immediately as an ambiguous notion, straddling between idealism and ideology, innovative research and historicist formalism. The failure of socialist realism and the crisis of its architectural image, emphatic and monumentalist, clearly shows the utopian character of the realist “dream”, but also, in a way, his imaginative power in striving to build a better world. Maybe that’s why after the Second World War the question of realism comes again into discussion, especially in Italy, as an alternative to the modern paradigm, no less utopian, which was seeking absolute laws in defining form and space. Ernesto Nathan Rogers first in 1962 devotes an issue of «Casabella» to the USSR, and a few years later he wrote a book eloquently entitled "Utopia of reality", with the ambition «to transform reality in its deepest essence, in the moral and political, as well as in the didactic and pedagogical fields». Realism thus returns to the core of the theoretical discussion on architecture, both in relation to the emerging postmodern American proposals, and mainly in relation to the architecture of the "Tendenza". The way Aldo Rossi was fascinated by the Berliner Stalinallee is perhaps the clearest example of this attitude. He writes in the short essay "Une éducation réaliste": «At first I saw realism as an alternative solution: it first fought with superiority the grey and penitentiary appearance of modern architecture». The paper proposes a survey on the realisms of Twentieth century as a tool to reflect on the current state of architecture: after the excesses of the postmodern age, the disillusionment of Tendenza’s rationalism and the dialectics reconstruction – deconstruction, a new spectre of “Realism” seems in fact nowadays haunting Europe, and also in architecture emerges, again, the interest in a return to reality, to build a better world. Maybe is realism of today’s great utopia?