The unusual story of Italian rationalism poses some questions if related to the orthodox formulations of European, and particularly German, rationalism. Those questions are about the uniqueness of that heroic experience, its developments, receptions and reformulations occurred in Italy since the fifties, sixties and seventies up to the recent current reconfigurations in the name of rational architecture or of the "architecture of reason" with a further reference to the Enlightenment season.

The Italian contribution to the overall style of modern architecture project, by many, was interpreted as a specific way able to combine originally the renewal requests contained in the modern experience with the lessons of history, the finitude of the shapes, the strict relationship with the city.

The works by Terragni, Libera, Figini and Pollini, BBPR and then Gardella testify of this particular Italian variation of the northern rationalists etymons and increasingly the disciplinary re-foundation of the seventies, carried out by the exhibition "rational architecture" edited by Aldo Rossi for XV Triennale of Milan, confirms this continuous "renegotiation" (Purini) in the light of the ancestral legacy of the tradition of our country.

The tendency seems to aim, with very different but comparable ways and results, to a combination of a classical aspiration, an unavoidable relationship with reality, formal concision, volumetric perfection, the adoption of the analogy's technique with simplification of the syntactic constructs.

To what extent is it possible to reconnect the recent theoretical and practical experiences on the expressiveness of the forms, the role of the construction in architectural representation, the relationship with the city and its morphology with the first twentieth-century debut even there always hovering between avant-garde motions and connections with the heritage of tradition up to historicism (of those years and also of today) and the theoretical vocation?

What binds the current reflection on rational architecture, developed in Italy prior by E.N. Rogers, Quaroni and Samonà and then by Rossi, Grassi and Monestiroli, shared, once again, with the contemporary German architectural culture (Ungers, Kleihues) as well as by Gregotti and Purini with prospects at that time opened by Pagano, Persico, Giolli, Bardi?

The idea is not to produce a precarious attempt of actualization but to investigate differences, analogies, contradictions and progressive instances contained in that story.

The EDA issue will try to answer to these questions and is open to new possible questionings from different disciplinary points of view, including theoretical reflections, projects, research experiences.