PIETRO SCIBILIA Ingegnere Architetto (1889-1971)

The book analyzes the professional activity of the architect and engineer Pietro Scibilia (1889-1971), who operates in the period between the Twenties and the Sixties of the twentieth century, comparing the production design with the local and national contemporary scene.The research, told through the analysis of its projects and its vast architectural production, was based primarily on the study of the documentary fund constituting the Scibilia archive and was supported by a survey also carried out in other Sicilian archives, first of all the Historical Archive of the City of Palermo, which proved to be a source of primary importance for the procurement of new projects, of which copies were kept and often supplied with their relative documentation.The projects demonstrate the intense activity of a professional who, while adhering to different instances, maintained throughout the course of his career a substantial coherence, revealing versatility in the field of design through constant attention to the issues of contemporary architectural debate. The survey, aimed at identifying the distinctive features of its architecture, has allowed us to outline the presence of a search path that leads him, as happens to other engineers and architects belonging to his generation, to the experimentation with different languages, which is reflection of an era full of profound changes: from an initial measured adherence to the Liberty movement, which manifests the assimilation of the Ernesto Basile school, Scibilia, through intermediate stages, especially in the second half of the Thirties, reaches a rationalist language which will result, starting from the Second World War, in a very clear and resolute participation in instances of Functionalism.