‘Complexity and Contradiction’:The Italian Architectural Landscape

The character of Roman church building was established once and for all in the second half of the fourth century, as the architectural legacy of Constantine was embraced by his imperial successors, and at the same time reduced to a type that was easily reproducible by patrons of lesser means. The emergence and persistence of this type suggest that the papal administration actively participated in church building even before the pope became the leading sponsor of new ecclesiastical construction in the fifth century. As patrons, popes inherited the duty of secular rulers to embellish their capital with opulent, showy buildings, but initially they were without the technical, material, and creative resources that had migrated to the chief sites of imperial activity: Milansucceeded in 402 by Ravennaand Constantinople. Thus the colonnaded thin-walled construction introduced by Constantinian architects became an invariable norm, as it was conducive to relatively simple designs that could be realized with either new or reused materials and made to look splendid by surface coatings of marble and mosaic. In the fourth century papal patronage favored consistency over variety and invention, as a means of asserting institutional identity and a connection with authoritative models of the past. Like Greek temples, therefore, church basilicas of this period tend to be fundamentally the same; yet they are also all individually different, as deliberate or accidental variations in site, size, proportions, and ornament precluded identical repetition.

Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 2014

When we think of the history of modern architecture the story might revolve around the Germans and the Bauhaus, but Diane Ghirardo’s Italy: Modern Architectures in History might give us pause, since it reminds us of a more fundamental driver of “the modern,” namely, the rise of the nation-state. This was a significant aspect for the Prussians during the Enlightenment, and indeed some have argued that Friedrich Schinkel was, in a sense, the first modern for the Germans. But the German unification as such took place only in 1871, and though there are many parallels, the Italian situation was considerably more stressed, for they not only had to build a nation-state after 1861 out of the chaos of unification but also had to do so in the vortex of modern industrialization. Timing was everything; the Greeks won their independence in 1830, but the Greeks never accepted—or perhaps one can say embraced— “the crisis of modernity” in quite the same way as the Italians.

In his last published article (“A Black Box”), Reyner Banham argued that architecture owed fifteenth-century Tuscany a debt for fostering a concept, disegno, against which it was long measured as a body of knowledge. Architects from Tuscany and elsewhere regarded Rome as a live lesson in their art. Italy’s cities have long been held as important for the evolution of architectural ideas elsewhere, its architects and architecture crucial points of reference for the disciplinary knowledge of modern architecture. Italian footprints can be found across histories of twentieth-century architectural culture, just as many parts of the world have found it important to “return” to Italy for instruction. The longue durée of Beaux-arts academicism’s veneration of Rome, the Venice School’s critical histories, and modernist and postmodern interest in Baroque space, Renaissance proportion, Mannerist ambiguity and postmodern referentiality are only a few examples of many recurrent sites, architects, authors, and frameworks observed or read into Italian architecture, cities and critical discourse that occupy prominent positions in the twentieth century’s historiography of architecture. The conflicted message of Le Corbusier’s “The Lesson of Rome” (in Vers une architecture) encapsulates Italy’s (and history’s) complex place in modern architectural culture as both problematic foil and powerful inspiration: to understand twentieth-century architecture, one must know Italy. And yet, to study Italy’s pervasive impact on contemporary architecture inevitably invokes a contentious privilege. In the age of “global” architectural history and the corrective moves needed to read architecture into those situations (geographical, economic, racial, or cultural) where it had been overlooked, Italy’s long-term prominence in the historiography of architecture and the artistic imagination demands reflection. How to embrace the complexity of the Italian peninsula’s history while acknowledging the clear lessons its architecture offered architects elsewhere? To account both for the specificity of cultural and political contexts and the abstractions derived from them? Does the study of Italian architecture—in curricula, and through institutions—reinforce an idea of architecture and the historical authority of its values that cannot be sustained either in professional education or historical research? Does pursuit by twenty-first century scholars of a deeper, broader Italy enrich the historical and critical references of contemporary architecture, or foster a rift between scholarship and its uptake? Is there any way left to study the history of Italian architecture beyond Italy that promotes a more open disciplinary map?

2023

The “Renaissance” gardens of Villa Madama, Raphael’s late masterwork for the Medici popes, were actually completely recreated in the twentieth century, although little information about them has previously emerged. Based on abundant material from private archives, this book reveals an unknown story of the gardens’ creation by an international cohort of designers and patrons. It further details how the restored villa came to be integrated into one of the most significant urban initiatives of the Fascist ventennio—the neighboring Foro Mussolini (current Foro Italico)—and linked with the seat of the Foreign Ministry in a verdant garden park. This novel account of the synergy among these coeval projects traces the interwar development of this symbolic entry zone to Rome, demonstrating the power of urban landscape for constructing political and cultural identity. This narrative integrates the histories of architecture, of gardens and landscape, of urban form, and of restoration with the storia del gusto and political history. It also introduces the villa’s owners—a French engineer, then an Italian count and a flamboyant American heiress—interweaving stories of their lives with their restoration of this significant heritage site, set against the political backdrop of the Fascist ascendency. The richly textured narrative yields a new portrait of the villa as an international salon for soft diplomacy, and examines the mythologizing of Renaissance heritage by ideologues and propagandists establishing the Third Rome. Ultimately it is a tale of diachronic political theater in the palimpsestic gateway to Rome, at a crucial moment for the formation of Italian cultural identity and Roman urban form. ==== I giardini “rinascimentali” di Villa Madama, ultimo capolavoro di Raffaello per i papi Medici, furono in realtà completamente ricreati nel XX secolo, anche se finora sono emerse poche informazioni su di essi. Basato su un abbondante materiale proveniente da archivi privati, questo libro rivela la storia sconosciuta della creazione dei giardini da parte di un gruppo internazionale di designer e mecenati. Viene spiegato in modo dettagliato come la villa restaurata fu integrata in una delle iniziative urbane più significative del ventennio fascista – il vicino Foro Mussolini (attuale Foro Italico) – e collegata con la sede del Ministero degli Esteri all’interno di un verdeggiante parco. Questo nuovo resoconto della sinergia tra questi progetti coevi ripercorre lo sviluppo tra le due guerre di questa simbolica zona di ingresso a Roma, dimostrando il potere del paesaggio urbano per la costruzione di un’identità politica e culturale. Questa narrazione integra la storia dell’architettura, dei giardini e del paesaggio, della forma urbana e del restauro con la storia del gusto e la storia politica. Presenta inoltre i proprietari della villa – un ingegnere francese, poi un conte italiano e una fiammeggiante ereditiera americana – che intrecciarono le loro vite con il restauro di questo importante sito storico, avvenuto all’interno del contesto politico dell’ascesa fascista. La narrazione riccamente strutturata fornisce un nuovo ritratto della villa come salone internazionale di diplomazia mondana ed esamina la mitizzazione dell’eredità rinascimentale da parte di ideologi e propagandisti che fondarono la Terza Roma. Infine, è un racconto storico del teatro politico di Roma, in un momento cruciale per la formazione dell’identità culturale italiana e della forma urbana romana.

2002

For many years our school of architecture has offered a summer course in Italy including a design studio for students of architecture, planning , and landscape architecture. The focus of the studies has been preservation in historic centers and the reuse of abandoned sites. Each year a different Italian city has hosted the design studio and set a theme for the project, dealing not only with reuse of historic buildings, but also with abandoned industrial sites, and reconstructions of parts of the historic city. The question of conservation of historic centers has in this way been approached as an architectural problem, addressing new development in addition to conservation of the existing. Examples of these projects are the work on the Papigno area for the city of Terni, and on the Canapina area within the historic walls of Perugia.

2006

LEARNING FROM ROME: historical cities and contemporary design

The results of research in urban morphology describe historic cities as urban organisms whose survival, transformation and management needs design-based complex actions to be investigated by analytical tools integrating different knowledge. Architecture, History, Geography are speculative discipline and provide useful tools to properly direct architectural projects, whether they are conceived or not in continuity with the urban and architectural language of the traditional existing context. Preserve and renovate the historic cities and the historical urban tissues should be a new focus of urban policies and of those entrepreneurs and conservation professionals which have identied the abandonment of these urban realities as the emerging political and economic dynamics. The scope of the conference is to collect studies, research, design and methodological reections on contemporary architecture, urban contexts and historical building, directing the outcome to the denition of operational tools useful for a aware and contemporary design. In recent years the reuse, the recovery, the architectural transformation of urban fabric are among the most practiced topic of the international architectural culture based both on open interpretations or limited to the aspect of conservation. The conference will be an opportunity to discuss on contemporary design in the historic city, on tools and research methods to be applied to these architectural dynamic realities, and on operational tools used for designing such meaningful anthropological spaces. ________________________________________________________________________ Veja-se o resumo do artigo " Cartography and iconography as diachronic analysis tools of the urban fabric ─ Évora and Setúbal (ABSTRACT)" na secção "PUBLISHED PAPERS".

2014

For the individual chapters, see the section 'MAJ 13 The Site of Rome' her on Academia. ."Chapter 1. Julie Rowe (La Trobe University): Rome's Mediaeval Fish Market at S. Angelo in Pescheria Chapter 2. Joan Barclay Lloyd (La Trobe University): Memory, Myth and Meaning in the Via Appia from Piazza di Porta Capena to Porta S. Sebastiano Chapter 3. Louis Cellauro (Deutsches Studienzentrum, Venice): Roma Antiqva Restored: The Renaissance Archaeological Plan Chapter 4. Donato Esposito (Metopolitan Museum, New York): The Virtual Rome of Sir Joshua Reynolds Chapter 5. Lisa Beaven (University of Sydney): Claude Lorrain and La Crescenza: The Tiber Valley in the Seventeenth Century Chapter 6. David R. Marshall (University of Melbourne): The Campo Vaccino: Order and the Fragment from Palladio to Piranesi Chapter 7. Arno Witte (University of Amsterdam): Architecture and Bureaucracy: The Quirinal as an Expression of Papal Absolutism Chapter 8. Tommaso Manfredi (University ‘Mediterranea’, Reggio Calabria): Arcadia at Trinità dei Monti. The Urban Theatre of Maria Casimira and Alexander Sobieski in Rome Chapter 9 . John Weretka (University of Melbourne): The ‘Non-aedicular Style' and the Roman Church Façade of the Early Eighteenth Century "