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