At the beginning of the 19th century, the problem of housing exploded with extreme violence across Europe as a result of the industrial revolution and above all the emergence of heavy industry which caused the peasant population to transfer to the cities and become in a short space of time the urban proletariat.
The dismal working conditions in the factories, their damp dusty unhealthy environment, the gruelling pace required by the laws of profit which spared neither women nor children with the consequent spread of rheumatic and respiratory illnesses, and the low wages which were insufficient to satisfy even the most basic needs, are already well known especially due to the Marxist historiographical approach which helps us to understand the problem in its international context.
The negative consequences of factory organisation affected the workers’ way of life, they had to accept temporary accommodation in attics, cellars and hovels which were also typical of the Italian industrial cities like Genoa, Turin, Milan etc.
The problem was taken up by town planners, economists, philosophers, industrialists and even the government, who feared the possibility of revolutionary uprisings caused by social expectations. On the one hand we see numerous utopian theories on town planning, for example those proposed by Owen and Fourier and inspired by the newly-born socialist ideologies, while on the other, the initiatives of the individual states - like the reform plan for the historical centre of Paris carried out by Hausmann - which interpreted the needs of the middle-classes by improving wheeled-vehicle traffic, but mainly marginalised and controlled the old inhabited neighbourhoods. Therefore, though the grand urban utopias showed willingness they also showed the inability of illuminated entrepreneurs, philanthropists and governments to respond to the needs of an industrial society characterised by serious class tensions and instability, which were revealed by the way the area itself was organised.

Ever since the first few decades of the nineteenth century, some attempts to create ‘social towns’ inspired by foreign experiences had been made in Italy, for example the socio-familial community promoted by the entrepreneur Ginori in Doccia with the construction of workers’ houses and social service institutions, and the small village, organised around the Montecerboli lake workshops, with the appearance of a fief where the modest dwellings of the workers were dominated by the Lardarel mansion which gave the village its name in 1846.

Alessandro Rossi was the first Italian to deal with the problem of housing for his own employees in an organised way, by including it within his global plan on socio-economic policy.
During the primary phase of the reconstruction of his wool mill, Rossi chose the area adjacent to the factory in Via Pasubio as the residential area for his employees and increased the height of one of his old buildings. From this operation emerged the so-called ‘palazzon(1)’ (demolished in 1965 ca.), a kind of a mixed solution, a synthesis between a large tenement house and a block of flats, clearly inspired by the French and English experience.
This type was soon abandoned by the Schio entrepreneur though not so much for functional reasons, given that it guaranteed a minimum cost
for the maximum use of space and habitability, as for socio-political reasons.

The prospect of the ‘palazzon’, which meant a collective way of life, would have, in fact, revolutionised the rural habits of the peasant-workers, habits which the entrepreneur, in his paternalistic, class-conscious view of society, intended to preserve.
The problem of the dwellings was successively tackled by Rossi in a more organised and modern way by the creation of real neighbourhoods near his factories, among which the one in Schio stands out.

The complex history of the New Workers’ Neighbourhood in Schio, built by Antonio Caregaro Negrin, helps us to understand by means of the different planning phases, the types of dwellings and the way they were built, the ideology of the commissioner as well as the eclectic culture of his urban architect in their attempt to make the utopia of the ‘ideal town’ come true. The uncertainty of the original plan can be plainly seen from analysing the various finished projects before the general planimetry was carried out on the 28th July 1872, this appeared as a romantic garden town and contained obvious references to Owen’s experience and to the Belgian industrial cities.

At the beginning, the workers’ dwellings were laid out according to an ordered and rational scheme along the lines of the brand-new neighbourhoods built in Europe. This proposal, however, was immediately abandoned because the arrangement of the streets was too regular; therefore, in his second plan, Caregaro Negrin designed a varied series of detached and semi-detached houses within ‘irregular and picturesque’ patches of land. The layout, which was more in line with the culture of this urban architect, who had created romantic gardens and parks, was approved by Rossi except for a few variations in order to avoid too marked a distinction between the “humble clean houses of the workers and those destined for the more well-to-do families”.

Later, the axis joining the Rossi Wool Mill with the Leogra torrent was also moved to reach the 28th July 1872 Project(2) in which the landscaped road network was highlighted by the two main avenues orthogonal to each other, according to classical town planning taught since the Alexandrian epoch, but having the minor roads following a curved route(3) so as to avoid the traditional chequered patchwork; however, they were lined with trees, with one every ten metres along the former, every eight metres along the latter, and one every six metres in the squares, which were decorated with fountains and rich vegetation(4).
This was the weft the new neighbourhood(5) was built on, which stretched from the south west of the existing urban centre as far as the torrent and covered an area of 152,000 square metres. In order to fully explain the layout, structure and styles of the various buildings, the architect attached twenty-one large-scale drawings to the general planimetry, these illustrated the plans, elevations, sections, and views of the houses in their exact locations including their green areas.

page 1/5 | page 2/5 | page 3/5 | page 4/5 | page 5/5