Il contributo della “scuola siciliana” al dibattito sulla casa popolare negli anni ‘30 ,

The paper gives a contribution to the debate about public housing taking place between the two world wars, mainly carried out by some engineers trained in the school of Palermo. In those years, at the “Regia Scuola di Applicazione” of Palermo, together with the end of the opportunity to graduate architects, it occurred the end of the period strongly characterized by Ernesto Basile and the emergence of personalities, including Enrico Calandra and Giuseppe Samonà, forced to move elsewhere to succeed in the professional and academic field. Both, however, continued to collaborate and above all to be reference points for the generation of architects and engineers of the '30s. Researches on "public housing" were systematized by means of the text published by Samonà in 1935, and constituting an atypical contribution, and almost neutral, in the debate between traditionalists and rationalists. In Sicily, the research were extended to studies on rural construction and small towns carried out by Ajroldi, Caracciolo, Lanza and Epifanio and their outcome affected the few buildings of those years and especially the design of the first INA-Casa neighborhoods, realized in Sicily after World War II, reproducing clear styles of local vernacular architecture.