Corviale, Il Serpentone

Corviale is a 1 km long housing complex in the periphery of Rome. The building was commissioned in 1972 by the IACP (Institute for social housing) to a group of architects directed by Mario Fiorentino to solve the acute lack of housing for working class families. The building was based on the idea of social housing according to Le Corbusier, to provide all infrastructures of a city needed within the complex itself, and to encourage social contacts between the occupants. For internal and political reasons many of these originally planned structures were never realized or are, almost 20 years after the first occupants moved in, still unfinished. The work addresses the failure of the utopian modernist architecture in social and everyday life.