Summer 1958: Nervi's Pantheon

A ‘big top’ in concrete, held by taut concrete guy ropes, its concrete edges lifting to the wind.” That’s how Concrete Quarterly introduced readers to the Palazetto dello Sport (page 8), completed two years before the 1960 Rome Olympics.

There was a “wonderful grace” to the structure, which had been designed by Pier Luigi Nervi in collaboration with architect Annibale Vitelozzi. The secret was the interplay between the perimeter structure of 36 forking buttresses and the diamond-shaped sections of the 200ft-diameter dome, “narrowing to the apex and broadening to the base”.

The buttresses were in the form of a low, raking Y and were self-supporting, with a second leg branching out from the junction of the Y. “The combination of good concrete with strong timber markings gives them a look of fine, taut strength. (Nervi, however, was not satisfied: the concrete should have been better …).”

The ribbed units of the dome were precast on site, on forms made on a template that reproduced exactly a 10 degree section of the dome. The outer layer was a 1-inch thick shell of ferro-cement, Nervi’s trademark light reinforced concrete made with wire reinforcement and high quality sand-cement mortar.

But it was the structural ribs below that truly took our correspondent’s breath away. “The vast unfolding flower of the roof spreads its petals across what seems immense space, filled, spilling over, with light”. 

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