The Italian Engineers' Architecture and Technique Training

This paper aims to analyze the role and the importance accorded to architecture in the training of Italian engineers between nineteenth and twentieth century. Careful examination of teaching programs that professors – like Calderini, Muggia etc.- offered to young students, will emphasize the interest in the discipline of architecture and its history. The chair of Technical Architecture in the Schools of Application for Engineers, and later in the Faculties of Engineering, testified this attitude. It was, in effect, a teaching both technical and artistic. The teaching of the engineer Guerra in Naples (1920-1960) confirms this interest in architecture and in particular in the examples of the past. Constructive elements and technical aspects are often related to the history of architecture and to the practice of drawing. The paper aims to focus on the Italian teaching and pedagogy with particular emphasis on the period from the late nineteenth to mid twentieth century.