The stereotype wants a confrontation between Rome and Milan. The first is back, and provincial steppingstones to power, the second - "transmission belt with Europe" - not necessarily cutting edge of industry. Let's be clear: there is much truth. Marcello Piacentini, who ruled the Italian architecture between the wars, could not be Roman while Joseph Pagano, director of Casabella, working in Milan. Yet when we look at the whole architecture of that period that we are, we find that these differences affect more the exception than the rule, as the leading figures and opinion makers the built landscape. The history of the city becomes more complex and difficult, but even more fascinating.
on two wheels, navigating the streets and squares sometimes find anonymous architecture, child out of the limelight, but a city that tell the history and character. In Rome, in Quadrio Pirani turn of the century row houses in San Saba, Innocenzo Sabbatini popular of the many interventions by the mysterious inner gardens or the flying fortress of the Tiber Giulio Gra Flaminio.
This is a building without an author long been so little studied it was the designer, but that strikes anyone who approached him: citizens common as a director Nanni Moretti who dedicated a beautiful sequence in his "Dear Diary". All of this building is striking: the size, color, shaping profile, materials, details, and only his strong stand on the banks of the Tiber, but also his mysterious Roman to be discovered because non-trivial quotation.
The "Gra Condominium" is located in an area of \u200b\u200bintensive high ten multi-storey buildings, not far from the Olympic stadium. The relationship between architecture and cities, many obsessions that created the Italian architects, there is a summary. The economic reasons for imposing the maximum use of the lot are not accepted practice with an amorphous building. While responding to the logic of the optimization of land, building and using the usual type of apartment building, the building is able to characterize the morphology of the Tiber when the building stops to make way all'invaso aligned with the bridge leads to the Foro Italico. The building has a facility in "U", which opens its two secondary arms on the side streets. The united front on the Tiber is also expressed by a great distance. The treatment is asymmetrical with a ninety-degree angle to adjust on a small road nearby, but with a rounded shape and separate the different levels sull'invaso now occupied by the adjacent park created for the World Cup 90. If the architecture in the city not can do without the economic and land density, here we show that mass and plastic cube can have values \u200b\u200bthat they return to the city as surplus value of images. At the end of architecture is one reason that it would not be even worth remembering.
But the interest, and the true worship of some building to this episode, goes further. The condo Gra is one of the few examples of this century who can take advantage-without resorting to linguistic elements and decorative-classical direct derivation from the lessons of the late Renaissance Rome. The composition is divided in three parts of the structure of the building codified in the sixteenth century: a base comprising the first two floors, an elevation that unifies the next three, a band of crowning the top level. Lashed by the powerful tapering piers tilted, the building touches the sky with the disarticulation of the volumes that the two floors above the crown of the attic, floors and terraces are released to create a fluid contact with air. The nautical metaphor and the driver is intertwined with that of the classical temple.
The close-up view allows you to discover other qualities. First to find the chiaroscuro of the century architecture, with the deep cone of shadow that creates the giant order system of access and hollow out the middle part of the elevation. Then the accuracy details and the entire construction. Finally, the rich chromaticism played on the relationship between four materials: travertine used in the base and crown, the brick at the three levels of elevation, the towers in front of the attic and back, the green marble in the hole of the façade features dual inputs.
But which path through biographical and professional Giulio Gra has come to build this work so beautiful and unique?
Gra was born in 1900 in Rome where he studied engineering, graduating at twenty-two. His teachers are Gustavo Giovannoni and especially Peter Aschieri realizes that in the Twenties and Thirties solid and honest work of industrial architecture that, without formality, refer to Peter Behrens and the first modernist buildings. Immediately after graduation, he joined his brother Henry became co-owner of a solid and reputed construction industry: most of his works becomes the result of a path from design implementation covers all phases of construction. The solidity of the construction firm, the classification of laborers and the accuracy of projects ensures that blocks of housing based on an economic program content and partially funded by the state (the clients are often co-employees of the government) have a ' image and decor well above the actual budget. Gra reveals a lot of attention in studying the volumetric ratios and distribution systems in relation to situations where buildings are located. Widening, intersections, axial or frontal views in perspective become occasions for joint construction and characterization of the environment.
For the first ten years, his research is certainly expressive of the rearguard. Pursuing a classical language trying to imbue its factories plasticity late Renaissance. The terraced street Sacchetti (1926-1928) and the Via Mangili (1928) in the elegant Parioli district, the buildings over to Trieste (1928-1930), the building on Avenue of the Arts (1929-1930) and the palace the square of the Navy (1930-1931) exhibit decorative elements derived directly by Michelangelo, Carlo Rainaldi, Giacomo della Porta: rusticated in the basements, the timpani and riquadrature a newsstand for windows, large balconies of several floors of the building in exceptional items. Often the image is developed through a typical trick of mannerism: "the building in the building" that wants the presence of parties formally committed to dialogue with the whole. More than half a century after construction, these structures enrich the patina and flavor of the time immersed in the greenery that surrounds them on all sides, the classical forms are transformed into romantic ruins which dilutes the original rhetoric.
Passing this phase is marked by the convent in Via Cairoli, 1933. Here Gra stripping language, remove the decorative elements of a more direct from the Renaissance while retaining the classic design themes and a sense of the building. Happen to the convent of unrealized projects in Catania and Novara in which he began to study the elements that apply in his masterpiece completed in 1939. The Condominium Gra is the manifesto of a way for the Roman architecture that remains largely unexplored, even by its creator. In fact, the engineer after the war, he portrays himself and will plan more until his premature death in 1958.
If there is one book authors and writers who on one occasion in their lives were able to launch an authentic message, Giulio Gra with us, perhaps, in front of a designer "of a single architecture." Yet what he did in his condominium on the Tiber Flaminio, it seems sufficient to give testimony to a genuine research and to indicate one more way.
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"The exercise of discipline is ethical conduct in which their profession is seen essentially as a collective work within a tradition of urban construction and operating effectively and is, therefore, a concrete expression of a architectural culture that, even if it can be described as moderate, is exemplary in terms of professional consistency. " And 'This is the interpretive key which is traced career and copious production of the Roman architect Mario De Renzi. The book Mario De Renzi. The architecture as a profession Maria Luisa of Blacks, is divided into three parts. The first two are examined "The work between the wars" and "The experience of war" with lyrics rich in information and references and an interesting illustrative material. The third part is a register of 138 projects with each of the basic data, archival sources, a bibliography and some pictures. It is a valuable historical contribution because some projects do not appear in the first monograph in 1981 by Carunchio.
back over the work of Mario De Renzi through this monograph makes to discover a prominent figure and also a contradictory figure that characterizes the work. If the opinion is certainly shared by Maria Luisa Blacks (which ascribes the entire output by a professional consistency moderate) except in a few works by De Renzi shows a culture to date, opened an intelligence and talent of the first magnitude. The distinction, however, in today's very little chance, between prose and poetry, between current production and synthesis significantly becomes necessary to grasp the originality of his contribution: 4:00 to 5:00 buildings rising canny craft a true expression to exceed its shallows of context Roman and should appear in any of our in-depth survey of modern architecture. The contradiction is that the relevance of these works was very foggy here (and critically underrated) just by the abundance of production of De Renzi. On the other hand is a fact inherent in his personality. A strong natural tendency for the architecture, is associated with a "joie de vivre" that accommodating and Roman Bruno Zevi-albeit with affection and recognition among the very few value-could not remember when he wrote after the death on L ' Espresso .
Compared with the theme of the city, the architect makes a powerful style steering: the exaltation of the vertical, the balconies that wrap around the corners, and especially the great towers of glass scales are reasons absorb and revived the themes of futurism. Antonio Sant 'Elia and partly the expressionism of Erich Mendelsohn are clearly known to De Renzi. This is not a superficial epidermal adhesion, but a source of inspiration that is combined with the wise resolution urban distribution, construction and economic architecture of both original and just followed (except in the few works of Gino Capponi and Angiolo Mazzoni). The expressive value of the building is condensed in the court: the symbol of a city within a city, a new aspiration to rooted in a familiar building type, date of adoption of glass and steel together with the permanence of stone and brick in the base of ' plaster in elevation. E ' a space full of references and meanings that do not escape the feeling that Ettore Scola takes a single scene of his film "A Special Day".
The mixture of futurism and verticality found in the first work that achieves with Adalberto Libera, especially in the stylized fasces which places the entrance to the exhibition of the fascist revolution of 1932. But it is placed on the Aventine in the year following that a new clot is achieved. And 'one of the paradigmatic examples of that intersection that has a typically Roman one part an update of techniques and materials and adherence to the composition for separate entities is derived from the functional and the other the persistence of a strong value figural object. The first show is in the public hall (with its large windows and glass in the treatment volume of cement) and the iron logic of the system divided into separate components (the porch, the volume of the room, the office blocks), the seconds in the use of symmetry, the sheer volume covered in marble, to the way the stairs are told in front. Libera and De Renzi abandon the dictates of the transparency feature to take a big frame that only ambiguously reveals the stairs outside: through the use of a geometry of rafters with a trend opposite corner of the ramps. It 'the same procedure used in the rear, where the wall is covered with small incisions square so that it becomes an event formal self. The form in this climate takes an independent value, he says, referring to the whole affair and architecture, but within the coordinates of the contemporary language, echoing the world of classical buildings and for history and context is always present in the imagination of Roman architects .
The first work on which it is worthwhile to focus attention is the palace Federici (See Route De Renzi and Rome, Domus 730) designed in 1931. De Renzi is a successful young architect. Pigeonhole an impressive series of statements in competitions, collaborated with influential and powerful men like Alberto Calza Bini, chief architect and founder of the Union of the Faculty of Architecture in Naples, where De Renzi is professor of design. The architect is also an active member of the association of "Students of Architecture," a group linked to Gustavo Giovannoni and attentive to rediscover the values \u200b\u200brooted in the built heritage of the region. The production in the Twenties refers to the themes of the classical language consolidated. The main source is, like its contemporary Giulio Gra which recently we have dealt with the sixteenth-Roman, but on occasions less courtly love is enriched by a sincere commitment to the themes of Baroque architecture and less spontaneous and naive interventions in several locations in Lazio.
As De Renzi has practiced and understood the theories related rationalism during the thirties appears in another of his major works on the house of the Tevere Flaminio '33 with Calza Bini. Here form and program tend to overlap with the clarity of the poster. Related to the need they face privileged binds a clear overlap of the projecting balconies that mark the exact opposite in horizontal bands. Rhythm and simplicity, strict adherence to the program plan and elevation, formal elegance in an abstract can also be found in its design-for-Free again with the exhibition of the colonies in 1937, a true manifesto of a modus operandi all in the rationalism.
After the war, we have a new test of sensitivity accommodation incorporating the ferment of contemporary architectural debate. In 1949 we find him with Saverio Muratori in urban planning and design of some buildings in the neighborhood Ina Valco home in St. Paul. The Scandinavian moods, strong in the climate of our first war, engage in his love for old buildings spontaneous. The result is challenging especially in the way the buildings relate to the new urban fabric. The system of roads does not overlap with the sterile grid pattern of Le Corbusier or the picturesque village of contemporary Tiburtino Ludovico Quaroni and Mario Ridolfi. Here, urban design and type of building they live in a coordinated system, which will be another good test in the Tuscolano 1956. The building types tower in-line or come into direct contact with the road and help to establish the city through the continuity of the edges or the orientation of the arms of the triangular tower on the axes prevalent.
But in the climate of the new Association for Organic Architecture (APAO) active in Rome in the early postwar years that De Renzi created his latest masterpiece. In the project of your own home at Sperlonga, 1952, the architect is measured by his aspirations, his desires, his own talent. The good-natured and easygoing professional I reveals a safe, aggressive rock that rests on a building that takes its inspiration from the surrounding matter for deep excavations and projections of a composition that constantly turns on itself. A poster of great beauty, wisdom and strength left a legacy long before the disease take away the creative energies and lead to death.
back over the work of Mario De Renzi through this monograph makes to discover a prominent figure and also a contradictory figure that characterizes the work. If the opinion is certainly shared by Maria Luisa Blacks (which ascribes the entire output by a professional consistency moderate) except in a few works by De Renzi shows a culture to date, opened an intelligence and talent of the first magnitude. The distinction, however, in today's very little chance, between prose and poetry, between current production and synthesis significantly becomes necessary to grasp the originality of his contribution: 4:00 to 5:00 buildings rising canny craft a true expression to exceed its shallows of context Roman and should appear in any of our in-depth survey of modern architecture. The contradiction is that the relevance of these works was very foggy here (and critically underrated) just by the abundance of production of De Renzi. On the other hand is a fact inherent in his personality. A strong natural tendency for the architecture, is associated with a "joie de vivre" that accommodating and Roman Bruno Zevi-albeit with affection and recognition among the very few value-could not remember when he wrote after the death on L ' Espresso .
Compared with the theme of the city, the architect makes a powerful style steering: the exaltation of the vertical, the balconies that wrap around the corners, and especially the great towers of glass scales are reasons absorb and revived the themes of futurism. Antonio Sant 'Elia and partly the expressionism of Erich Mendelsohn are clearly known to De Renzi. This is not a superficial epidermal adhesion, but a source of inspiration that is combined with the wise resolution urban distribution, construction and economic architecture of both original and just followed (except in the few works of Gino Capponi and Angiolo Mazzoni). The expressive value of the building is condensed in the court: the symbol of a city within a city, a new aspiration to rooted in a familiar building type, date of adoption of glass and steel together with the permanence of stone and brick in the base of ' plaster in elevation. E ' a space full of references and meanings that do not escape the feeling that Ettore Scola takes a single scene of his film "A Special Day".
The mixture of futurism and verticality found in the first work that achieves with Adalberto Libera, especially in the stylized fasces which places the entrance to the exhibition of the fascist revolution of 1932. But it is placed on the Aventine in the year following that a new clot is achieved. And 'one of the paradigmatic examples of that intersection that has a typically Roman one part an update of techniques and materials and adherence to the composition for separate entities is derived from the functional and the other the persistence of a strong value figural object. The first show is in the public hall (with its large windows and glass in the treatment volume of cement) and the iron logic of the system divided into separate components (the porch, the volume of the room, the office blocks), the seconds in the use of symmetry, the sheer volume covered in marble, to the way the stairs are told in front. Libera and De Renzi abandon the dictates of the transparency feature to take a big frame that only ambiguously reveals the stairs outside: through the use of a geometry of rafters with a trend opposite corner of the ramps. It 'the same procedure used in the rear, where the wall is covered with small incisions square so that it becomes an event formal self. The form in this climate takes an independent value, he says, referring to the whole affair and architecture, but within the coordinates of the contemporary language, echoing the world of classical buildings and for history and context is always present in the imagination of Roman architects .
The first work on which it is worthwhile to focus attention is the palace Federici (See Route De Renzi and Rome, Domus 730) designed in 1931. De Renzi is a successful young architect. Pigeonhole an impressive series of statements in competitions, collaborated with influential and powerful men like Alberto Calza Bini, chief architect and founder of the Union of the Faculty of Architecture in Naples, where De Renzi is professor of design. The architect is also an active member of the association of "Students of Architecture," a group linked to Gustavo Giovannoni and attentive to rediscover the values \u200b\u200brooted in the built heritage of the region. The production in the Twenties refers to the themes of the classical language consolidated. The main source is, like its contemporary Giulio Gra which recently we have dealt with the sixteenth-Roman, but on occasions less courtly love is enriched by a sincere commitment to the themes of Baroque architecture and less spontaneous and naive interventions in several locations in Lazio.
As De Renzi has practiced and understood the theories related rationalism during the thirties appears in another of his major works on the house of the Tevere Flaminio '33 with Calza Bini. Here form and program tend to overlap with the clarity of the poster. Related to the need they face privileged binds a clear overlap of the projecting balconies that mark the exact opposite in horizontal bands. Rhythm and simplicity, strict adherence to the program plan and elevation, formal elegance in an abstract can also be found in its design-for-Free again with the exhibition of the colonies in 1937, a true manifesto of a modus operandi all in the rationalism.
After the war, we have a new test of sensitivity accommodation incorporating the ferment of contemporary architectural debate. In 1949 we find him with Saverio Muratori in urban planning and design of some buildings in the neighborhood Ina Valco home in St. Paul. The Scandinavian moods, strong in the climate of our first war, engage in his love for old buildings spontaneous. The result is challenging especially in the way the buildings relate to the new urban fabric. The system of roads does not overlap with the sterile grid pattern of Le Corbusier or the picturesque village of contemporary Tiburtino Ludovico Quaroni and Mario Ridolfi. Here, urban design and type of building they live in a coordinated system, which will be another good test in the Tuscolano 1956. The building types tower in-line or come into direct contact with the road and help to establish the city through the continuity of the edges or the orientation of the arms of the triangular tower on the axes prevalent.
But in the climate of the new Association for Organic Architecture (APAO) active in Rome in the early postwar years that De Renzi created his latest masterpiece. In the project of your own home at Sperlonga, 1952, the architect is measured by his aspirations, his desires, his own talent. The good-natured and easygoing professional I reveals a safe, aggressive rock that rests on a building that takes its inspiration from the surrounding matter for deep excavations and projections of a composition that constantly turns on itself. A poster of great beauty, wisdom and strength left a legacy long before the disease take away the creative energies and lead to death.
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