The condominio: the new housing model during the Italian boom

Chiara Ingrosso addresses the Italian condominio of the 1950s and 1960s, a notion that shows that, unlike in the quasi-socialist housing regimes of the welfare states of northern Europe, postwar housing developments in southern Europe were outright liberal from the start. The period is known in Italy as the time of the economic “boom,” a phase in which governmental policy stimulated the production of a large number of apartments, and at the same time supported private property, thus making housing instrumental in the consolidation of the middle-class. The condominio was a mass housing “model” for the middle classes. As an urban typological concept, the term also had a “declination”: the palazzina, corresponding to a different, more self-centered urban form. As “product homes,” condomini were also authored architectural objects, raising the question of the role of the architect in housing commodification. The paper refers to the cities of Milan and Rome, but it mainly makes the case for Naples, challenging its unfair marginalization in current architectural historiography.