ABSTRACT

From the 1960s onwards, there were several people in Rome who were conducting research based on the semantic relationship with the past and on the abstract nature of architectural signs. These researchers saw Kahn as a key figure and considered him, rightly or wrongly, as the only person who could restore modern architecture to its place in the course of history. Apart from their academic training, the one thing all these architects had in common was a certain idea of organism, clearly deriving from Roman models, which became the major theme around which most of the works with links to Kahn's legacy developed. In chronological terms, Kahn's legacy to the Roman school can be divided into two different periods; the first in the mid-1960s, with the generation of Purini, Ciucci and Group of Architects and City Planners, and second after the late 1970s, developing in fits and starts, but in a pre-postmodern form, all the way up to the 1990s.