Giovanni Michelucci in Florence: Where to See the Great Architect’s Work

The way we inhabit spaces is deeply bound up with our identity and culture. Dwelling is something profoundly connected to our outlook on the world and to our values. That is why an architect doesn’t merely design a building, but very often becomes an interpreter of social dynamics. This role was brilliantly filled by the Tuscan Giovanni Michelucci, who devoted his whole life to planning a new city, inclusive and innovative. An empathetic, curious man who believed in “making the city” and in the building site as a happy place, who loved surrounding himself with young people and valued the company and commitment of all his collaborators, from designers to laborers. As his colleague Andrea Aleardi tells us, he “had a sense of the future, persistent and compelling, that never let him lose that joyful hope as an existential, profoundly human dimension.”

Aiming to gather his output on both a professional and a human level — Michelucci’s is a path that runs from Fascist-era architecture all the way to the postmodern — a monograph has been published by Angelo Pontecorboli Editore. It was edited by Andrea Aleardi, director of the Fondazione Giovanni Michelucci, and was made possible thanks to the support of the Ministry of Culture’s Directorate-General for Education, Research and Cultural Institutes and of the Tuscany Region. Here we revisit all the buildings designed by the Tuscan architect that anyone living in or passing through Florence often has right before their eyes, without knowing they are the fruit of his work.

1. Firenze Santa Maria Novella Station and the Palazzina Reale

You’ve surely caught a train from Firenze Santa Maria Novella, or passed through the station, but have you ever wondered who is behind its first architectural project? Michelucci himself. The architect handled both the passenger building and the Palazzina Reale. For the former, he entered the 1932 competition with a group of young colleagues — Berardi, Baroni, Gamberini, Lusanna, Guarnieri — and won the commission. The Tuscan group gave rise to a 106-meter horizontal concourse. A structure that fits perfectly into its surroundings, its compact volume and spare style sitting well beside the church across the way. The glass roof lends the building a theatrical touch, along with the various colored marbles of the interior cladding and the floors, and the wood and bronze finishes. To this day the Santa Maria Novella station — with its boxlike form — remains contemporary and perfectly functional, and in 1951 Frank Lloyd Wright called it the most organic work in the Italian architectural landscape. The Palazzina Reale, meanwhile — set at the edge of the site near Via Valfonda — was intended for the royal family and still keeps its original appearance today. A refined, intimate space built with fine materials, crowned by Italo Griselli’s statues L’Arno e la sua valle (“The Arno and Its Valley”), set in a sunken basin lined with pale-blue tesserae and edged in marble.

2. Ponte alle Grazie

It was previously called Ponte di Rubamonte, after the podestà who had it built to a design by Vasari. It withstood every flood until 1944, when it was blown up by the retreating Nazi troops. It was Michelucci who won the competition for its reconstruction the following year, alongside Edoardo Detti, Riccardo Gizdulich, Danilo Santi and the engineer Piero Melucci. The initial design underwent many changes — such as scaling back the height of the piers, which were meant to produce a majestic surge of water — before settling into the structure we see today: five arches in concrete faced with pietraforte. Ponte alle Grazie is one of the bridges we often find ourselves crossing on the way to the Oltrarno, a work by Michelucci that we still use today and that slots perfectly into Florence’s artistic heritage while embodying a modern idea of architecture.

3. The INA Building on Lungarno del Tempio

We’re still in the center, near Ponte San Niccolò. Here INA commissioned Michelucci to design a building that could house residences, offices and shops alike. The architect and the engineer Ivo Tagliaventi designed a complex made up of three blocks at ground level for commercial use, which then merge on the upper floor by way of the stair towers. With a frontage that frays irregularly against the street, the building features alternating loggias, balconies and openings with wooden frames, fitting perfectly into the nineteenth-century urban fabric.

4. The Contini-Bonacossi Residence

In this building you can see the sense of giving each space its own character that was so dear to Michelucci. The pietraforte base, which provides continuity with the surrounding spaces, the Botticino marble banding and the concrete string-courses give rise to an elegant, compact two-tone building. The building originally arose as an annex to the Villa Contini-Bonacossi; today the ground floor houses shops, while the three upper floors are given over to apartments.

5. The Building on Via dello Sprone

In 1954 INA again commissioned Michelucci to design a building suited both to apartments on the upper floors and to commercial spaces at street level. So, at Via dello Sprone 1, an L-shaped building was constructed around an internal courtyard. Here too, as in all his works, the Tuscan architect knew how to interpret the trends of the day — such as the home-and-shop relationship — and the aesthetic of Florence. Indeed, the building is considered an example of modern architecture — with its pietraforte cladding and its overhanging roof — inserted into a historic city.

6. The Post Office Building on Via Pietrapiana

This building is home not only to the post office but also to offices, homes and spaces open to the public. Unusual, with its shifting floor planes and the staggered volumes of its facades, the building embodies Michelucci’s wish to embed each of his works in the surrounding urban fabric, generating relationships with everything around it. The Tuscan architect’s mastery lay in his ability to unite a nineteenth-century sensibility with modern trends, and every one of his projects bears witness to this. His aim was to bring into built form the very people who would go on to use what his work had created.

7. The Limonaia of Villa Strozzi

Built in iron and glass, the limonaia (lemon house) of Villa Strozzi converses with the garden, taking shape as a luminous open space suited to all kinds of events. The structure was carved out of the adjacent buildings that were once part of the Winter Palace. Michelucci began work in 1973, giving the limonaia a new architecture with a rhythm of serliana windows, a pool of water extending along three sides, and aerial walkways. Today the venue hosts all sorts of initiatives — parties, performances and concerts. A magical space, conceived as a hub of culture and encounter.

8. The Isolotto District

Designing a district also means imagining the lives of the people who will live in it; no one was better suited than Michelucci to see this task through. Setting out to create a “self-sufficient district” that could also be a “garden village” — commissioned by INA and helped by Sirio Pastorini, Mario Pellegrini, Ferdinando Poggi, Francesco Tiezzi, Burci and Alessandro Giuntoli — the architect conceived the Isolotto district. It unfolds around a longitudinal park that links the whole area: from the square to the school and the residential lots. The entire district revolves around green spaces arranged in a hierarchy and differentiated by social use. This organization fully reflects Michelucci’s modus operandi, which above all looked to social values and functions.

The Tuscan architect also worked on the intervention on the Sale dei Primitivi at the Uffizi, was involved in the participatory project for the Giardino degli Incontri (“Garden of Encounters”) at Sollicciano prison, and designed the headquarters of the Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze. For the latter he devised a route that would give continuity with the street and with the city at large, to convey that the bank’s activity is part of a wider social life.

The legacy of Giovanni Michelucci — embodied both in the works we can admire and in the monograph that recounts his spirit and his idea of architecture, the latter carried forward by the Fondazione since the 1980s — reminds us how the way we imagine, design and then build reflects the perspective from which we look at living together. The plans for the spaces where we will live, or where part of our days will unfold alongside others, are therefore indicators of the future society we want to inhabit. It was precisely for this reason that Michelucci pursued the architect’s craft with joy: because he felt part of a project shared by the entire community.

“So that today, at this advanced age, I feel happiness (I use this word in its truest sense: that the «happy» person is one who has, or believes he has, what he can desire) when, at work, drawing close to the laborers who realize what I have conceived, I understand the commitment of each of them, and my responsibility as a man is revealed to me and joins with the countless individual responsibilities of other men — so that, no longer only in commitment and responsibility, I sense at work that «collaboration» which drives away all conflict and draws everyone together out of necessity, out of a shared intent and a consonance of human interest […]. This goal […] is the only one acceptable to me, as the mental and moral stance of the artist before his work.”

A model figure for his sense of community, for the belief that one’s own identity is strengthened within the collective, for a holistic vision grounded above all in sharing and passion. These are the values that form the necessary foundations for the better future we aspire to, so that it may stand firm and well built.

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