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Ridolfi, Mario
(b Rome, 7 May 1904; d Lago di Piedilugo, 11 Nov 1984). Italian architect. He graduated in architecture from the Scuola Superiore in Rome in 1929, joined MIAR and collaborated with Adalberto Libera on a number of projects until 1932. He visited Germany in 1933 and in the same year formed a lasting professional association with the German engineer Wolfgang Frankel. The flowing three-storey façade of the Nomentana Post Office (1933), Piazza Bologna, Rome, is overtly Expressionist but in the work that immediately followed, the Palazzo del Littorio project (1933), flats on the Viale di Villa Massimo (1934–6) and on the Via San Valentino (1936), both in Rome, the geometry is orthogonal and Rationalist. After World War II, supporting the organicist cause, he taught at the Scuola di Architettura Organica, became co-editor (with Luigi Piccinato) of Metron (1945) and helped to produce an important urban development programme for Rome. With Ludovico Quaroni and others he submitted a controversial project for the Stazione Termini (1947) in Rome and, under the aegis of the Consiglio Nazionale della Ricerca, edited (with Cino Calcaprina) the influential Il manuale dell’ architetto. It became the reference base for the populist architecture of more than a decade of Italian neo-realism, of which the INA-Casa housing on the Via Tiburtino (1949–54), Rome, became the symbol. Cheaper, rougher, traditional materials and components were used, and the rehabilitation of craftsmanlike virtuosity expressed a significant desire for communication. The same polemic informs his three-storey blocks of flats for UNRRA (1950) in Popoli, the uncompromising tower blocks on the Viale Etiopia (1950–54), Rome, at Cerignola (1959) and numerous other INA-Casa developments from Naples (1956) to Belluno (1960), and including Terni (1949). He had retired to Terni after 1941, a city for which he had produced a number of urban planning proposals, the first in 1945, and culminating in detailed plans for the historic centre (from 1968): among many buildings that he designed there are the middle school on the Via Fratti (1952–61) and his own house, Casa Lina (1966) at Marmore. He committed suicide.
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