Beyond the Renaissance in Florence - Leonardo Savioli's modern tower house in via Piagentina 29

Leonardo Savioli (1917 - 1982) was one of the most important Florentine architects. Great illustrator, abstract expressionist and informal painter, professor at the University of Florence. He had graduated with Giovanni Michelucci and had participated in the planning of the Urban Development Plan of Florence in the years after the war (1949 - 1951). His collaborations for the Nuovo Mercato dei Fiori di Pescia (1948), for the complex of public housing in Sorgane, for the Giovanni da Verrazzano Bridge in Florence and many other projects are very important.

Of the many works carried out in Tuscany, we see here a residential building in via Piagentina 29 in Florence, considered one of the most significant examples of 20th century Florentine architecture. Designed for the Bacci family in 1964 and completed in 1967, the building has a brutalist structure in reinforced concrete, made up of prefabricated and modular concrete elements. A technique that Savioli had already used for the public housing in Sorgane.

The building develops in height, both due to the site’s size and the client's requests, and getting inspiration from the case torri (tower houses) of medieval Florence. The comparison comes naturally. On one hand the tower houses, little forts, castles in the city of the powerful Florentine families. On the other hand the brutalist architecture with exposed concrete. Both are somewhat reminescent of the military architecture, the one by Savioli of bunkers and casemates.
Moreover, the resemblance with a tower house was even stronger at the time of construction, when the building was surrounded low buildings and therefore stood out at the top, just like the tower houses used to do in the hystorical center of Florence. Later  equally tall buildings were built in the whole area and therefore this overall "vision" was lost.

The building is divided into four vertical volumes of different heights, well balancing solids and voids. The tallest structure is the central tower, with no windows except for a few small, which contains the stairs and elevators. Balconies, windows, French windows, glazed surfaces, louvers, are distributed unevenly on the different surfaces and all have different sizes and shapes. The corners of the components are all rounded and this gives a sense of continuity to the surfaces and unity to the project. The roof is accessible on one side, while on the other is consisting of a projecting canopy, inspired by the roofs by Le Corbusier, especially that of the Chapel of Notre-Dame du Haut in Ronchamp (1955). This is an element that Savioli will use in many other projects, such as Villa Bayon in Florence.

The construction had considerable critical success, due to the stylistic unity, the technical solutions, the variety and imagination of the elements. Those who do not understand or are not interested in architecture might find this building a bit austere because of its raw concrete structure, but to a more trained eye it appears as an outstanding and very recognizable design, one of a kind in Florence.