(b Villa Lagarina, Upper Adige, 1903; d Rome, 1963). Italian architect. At the outbreak of World War I his family moved to Parma, where he attended the Scuola Superiore, receiving his architecture degree in 1928. As early as 1926 he was active in the GRUPPO 7, and he is said to have been influential in that group’s early writings. He replaced Ubaldo Castagnoli as a fully-fledged member of the group in 1927 and in 1928 he helped to set up the Movimento dell’Architettura Razionale (MAR) and, in 1930, the Movimento Italiano per l’Architettura Razionale (MIAR). In 1928 he began to practise in Rome. With other members of the Milanese and Roman Rationalists, Libera participated in the Weissenhofsiedlung Exhibition in Stuttgart in 1927, where he showed a project for a hotel in the mountains. In 1928 (with Gaetano Minnucci) he organized the first Esposizione dell’ Architettura Razionale in Rome and helped organize the second, held in Pier Maria Bardi’s gallery in Via Veneto in Rome (1931), which contained Bardi’s famous ‘Table of Horrors’ (la tavola degli orrori, caricatures of the Academic architecture of the period) shown to Mussolini. This show prompted the more reactionary architects to form Raggruppimento degli Architetti Moderni Italiani (RAMI) supported by Marcello Piacentini, a force that soon caused the dissolution of MIAR.

• Libera, Adalberto
  • Italy, §II, 6(ii): Architecture: Novecentismo, Razionalismo & other styles, c 1920–c 1946
  • collaboration
    • Piacentini: (2) Marcello Piacentini
    • Ridolfi, Mario
  • groups and movements
    • Gruppo 7
    • MIAR
    • Rationalism (ii)
  • works
    • Figini and Pollini
    • Funi, Achille
    • Italy, §II, 6(iii): Architecture: Neo-Realism & Neo-Liberty to La Tendenza, c 1946–c 1970
    • Rome, §II, 4: Urban development, after 1869