Looking more specifically at the Italian situation, the post-World War II years were marked by an enormous surge in the building sector due to the need for reconstruction, as well as the growing urbanization and, not least, the need to house and employ the people who, leaving their former rural homes, were moving to the large urban centers. The experience of the INA public housing, divided into two 7 year periods between 1979 and 1963, played a fundamental role in social housing during the sensitive passage between the post-war reconstruction period and the economic boom. In this scenario, for many reasons, the building methods, the site organization and construction materials remained strongly rooted in national traditions and building quality was based on referring to the established status quo and the drawing up of dossiers1. The latter was assigned to the Architecture Department and included directives and proposals regarding defining the housing and the building typologies and their aggregation in a broader urbanization perspective. However, from the mid-seventies the approach and design in constructing social housing complexes changed.
The new settlements were still mainly made up of groupings of diverse typologies, specifically block and tower constructions, but the buildings themselves also became more complex and larger in size in order to respond to the increasing housing demand. In short, they were designed to accommodate the growing numbers of residents. At the same period, a progressive change in the building sector was occurring, both in its organizational structure, due to changes in the construction sector and Italian legislation and in construction methods. The increasingly larger size of the works, on the one hand, and developments in the industrial production of building technical elements and materials, on the other, resulted in the introduction and spread of industrially prefabricated components and the consequent transformation in building site organization. The changes in construction methods inevitably led to a shift of quality control from the site to the factory. In fact, if, traditionally, the building quality had been entirely entrusted to the knowledge of the builders and to the supervision and professionality of the project manager and site manager, industrialized production now became the required factor for service quality beyond the building site and, consequently, quality checks became essential in the production plant. However, the general supervision of all elements contributing to a construction project was fundamental and, unfortunately, at the beginning, the absence of quality checks on individual elements and methods resulted in a decrease in construction quality, as can be seen in many buildings constructed in the seventies. Moreover, in the eighties, there followed the planning of large self-contained suburbs to house thousands of new residents. From a construction perspective, at that time, the reference was the European experience which was based on principles related to expediency and the simplification of the building site work phases.
An example of this approach is the Vigne Nuove suburb, built during the seventies on the northern outskirts of Rome and presently part of Municipality III( fig. 1). The selected area had been individuated in the Zone 7 Plan, a building development plan for areas designated for social housing construction, where a sub-division of the area based on the zones to be developed was proposed, and where a residential zone had been clearly specified for the construction of residential buildings, a mixed zone for residential and non-residential buildings, a service facilities zone with public services and infrastructures, and a public green zone reserved exclusively for green areas, with a clear prevalence in surface area for residential use. In this plan, the construction of the residential buildings was directly managed by IACP( today ATER) based on an initial preliminary project later modified by a group of highly qualified designers2, coordinated by Lucio Passarelli. The project proposed the construction of a unitary set-
Energy retrofit for Rome municipality’ s residential real estate( ATER) 703