Competition Brief (1933)

“The Opera Nazionale per i Combattenti (ONC), with headquarters in Via Ulpiano 11, Rome, proclaims a nationwide competition open to all registered architects and engineers for the design of a development plan for a new communal centre of Sabaudia to be built in the reclaimed Pontine Marshes.

Plans of the location for the communal centre and its surrounding area will be provided by the onc.

The designers are given a free hand as long as the development plan responds to the functional needs of a fundamentally agricultural centre and to the requirements of hygiene, the market economy, traffic circulation, land allocation, building layout and of aesthetics—for a municipality of 20,000 people with 5,000 inhabitants in the centre itself.

The development plan must provide all the necessary public services for the efficient functioning of the new agricultural centre, and must include all the typical institutions of the Fascist Regime (which must be constructed before other buildings) such as; the town hall with its tower, the Fascist Party headquarters, a workers’ club, barracks for the Fascist Militia, the Carabinieri (military police), and the Pubblica Sicurezza (police); the headquarters for the Balilla (Fascist youth league); a church with bell-tower and rectory; a nursery; a primary school; a hospital; a maternity and infancy centre; veteran’s clubs; the local onc offices; a post office; a sports field; a covered market; a hotel; a cinema; an abbatoir; public housing with sixty apartments and thirty shops; and, a cemetery.”

Burdett, Richard, ed. Sabaudia 1933: Città nuova fascista (London: Architectural Association, 1981) 12. The competition brief in Italian can be found in Sabaudia: 1933–34, ed.s Giuseppe Pasquali and Pasquale Pinna (Milan: Electa, 1985) 22.