Between 1935 and the war years, Nervi and his company built several reinforced concrete airplane hangars for the Regia Aeronautica militare. Eight arose from the development of a single design for a ribbed pavilion vault with a geodesic structure, consisting of a set of 45° crossed arches with a maximum span of 50 m. Nervi arrived at this solution after a series of successive elaborations, initially studied for the Ciampino airport in 1935, starting from much more traditional schemes with portal and crossed reticular beams. For the first time, it made use of tests on scaled-down models carried out at the Milan Polytechnic by Guido Oberti to verify the suitability of the structural concept and refine the executive design. The first two airfields (1935-1938), entirely cast in situ, were built for the Orvieto military airport; the next six (1939-1942), distributed between Orvieto, Orbetello and Torre del Lago, follow the same geometric matrix as the first, but propose a drastic rethinking of construction processes: realised through the assembly of prefabricated lightened reticular structure elements, with only the integration of solid wall stiffening ribs in the most stressed areas, they anticipate the great use of structural prefabrication that Nervi would make in the post-war period.
Robust, built to last and resist wartime attacks, they were short-lived: all were demolished by German bombers in 1944. However, thanks to the spectacular images taken by the Vasari studio during and after the construction sites, they were not condemned to oblivion. After having edited their presentation in various architectural magazines between 1938 and 1941, Nervi always presented them as paradigmatic examples of an intuitive way of designing, capable of challenging conventions and as one of the first demonstrations of the potential of reinforced concrete in the field of large roofs. The exceptional nature of the aviorimessa should also be read in the light of the very special conditions of the Italian building industry in the pre-war autarchy years.
