Our History
The “Studio Cooperativo di Costruzioni Civili”, which was founded in 1947 by a group of young architects and engineers who had recently graduated from Milan Polytechnic and which became the “Cooperativa Architetti e Ingegneri” in 1952, was the first design cooperative in Italy..
Antonio Pastorini, Osvaldo Piacentini, Aldo Ligabue, Eugenio Salvarani, Athos Porta, Silvano Gasparini, Franco Valli, Ennio Barbieri, Antonio Rossi, who were joined in 1961 by Ermanno Grasselli and Paolo Voltolini, laid the ethical and cultural foundations of a futuristic design company.
It arose from the revolutionary ambition to the cooperative model of manual work and the individual model of intellectual disciplines.
From its earliest beginnings, the group has relied on a multidisciplinary team of urban planners, architects, engineers and economists – but without betraying the different outlooks of its members – starting with the nine founders, in a region and a city strongly characterized by diverse political and religious nuances.
The cooperative form was seen as an expression of mutual trust and support, where individual initiatives in which one person might impose strategies and hierarchies were rejected.
The “collective” cultivated numerous joint operations with leading figures in twentieth century Italian architecture, such as Franco Albini and Franco Marescottior in the political world of the time, like Ivano Curti and Giuseppe Dossetti.
The Cooperativa Architetti(Architects’ Cooperative), as it is often called, conquered the scene in Italian architectural culture, with various works completed between 1955 and 1970, published in the most important trade magazines (both national and foreign)..
During those years, it received the gold medal for architecture and several accolades from the National Institute of Architecture as well as the gold medal from the Province of Reggio Emilia.
The outstanding works that contributed to these successes include the INACASA social housing districts, the offices of institutions and companies in both Rome and Bologna, innovative urban redevelopment projects in various cities and regulatory plans for municipalities and provinces.
In the 1970s, following the construction of hospitals and hotels in Kenya and Somalia, its position was confirmed through important international architectural competitions inin Turchia, Tenerife, Algeria and Marocco.
Since the early 1980s the Cooperative of Architects and Engineers has carried out extensive study and development activities in the field of regional planning and and building design across all sectors: from residential construction to the tertiary sector and from commercial and industrial complexes to the design and restoration of numerous religious buildings..
A multidisciplinary approach has always been a distinguishing strength ofCAIRE and in the 1990s it contributed to the expansion of its activities in the field of structural and infrastructural design, computation, works management and complex plant engineering projects.
This projected the team into the new millennium, with an important legacy of skills, handed down to many young professionals and integrated into the technological progress of BIM (Building Information Modelling) design, allowing the company to remain a reference point over time for the colleagues and clients who have worked with it through more than seventy years of activity.
