Prefabbrichiamo la futura civiltà

When the reconstruction of Italy began after World War II, it adopted the Ina-Casa plan. This was based on traditional building concepts motivated by socio-political and economic concerns, aiming to restore housing and solve the problem of the ‘house for all’. Gio Ponti’s plans for reconstruction (and those of other professionals such as Gaetano Ciocca and Ortensio Gatti) were ignored, because they suggested different collaborations between designers and companies in the name of industrialisation. Ponti tried to prepare the industry for recovery after the war, inviting it to diversify and directing it towards the unification and standardisation of building elements in order to solve the housing need. He involved the most important Italian companies such as Montecatini, Saffa, Reggiane and Breda to produce elements that could be coordinated and applied to a large range of housing projects, examples of which were then published by "Stile". The implementation of the Ina-Casa plan, however, was holding back the interest of major Italian companies in the modernisation of the building sector, but interrupted neither the production of prefabricated houses nor the research of Ponti and Ciocc