E’ con un misto di indifferenza, di rassegnazione e di fastidio che leggiamo, oggi, sui quotidiani italiani la ripresa, in coro, di un articolo apparso sul “New York Times” a firma di Nicolai Ouroussof che critica il Richard Meier dell’Ara Pacis …
dove, tra l’altro, l’autorevole critico si lascia andare a considerazioni del tipo:
“Fuori scala in un modo assurdo …
indifferente alla nuda bellezza del città intorno …
è piena di inutili aggiunte: una lobby troppo formale, una libreria e una sala da 150 posti …
non c’è niente di lieve in quest’opera …
questo museo ci ricorda che la vanità non appartiene solo ai generali e ai politici …
dimostra cosa può accadere quando un architetto ‘feticizza’ il suo stile …
il muro di travertino, visto dalla strada, taglia in due le chiese …
lo stesso progetto soffoca la piazza, esercitando una pressione irrispettosa …”
complimenti per la tempestività …
peccato che quelle stesse cose qualcuno le abbia dette e scritte più di dieci anni fa … nell’indifferenza, anzi, nell’ostilità più totale …
magari ci si poteva anche risparmiare la fatica di costruirlo … il baraccone …
per rendersi conto della cazzata … bastava guardare i primi disegni …
restiamo comunque in attesa delle prossime “proposte” per la piazza …
al danno … si aggiungerà così anche la beffa …
Centro Studi Giorgio Muratore 
Ma ora c’è la fontana, che abbellisce il tutto con i suoi spruzzi zampillanti. Conferisce alla piazza un gradevolissimo ed equilibrato pugno nello stomaco.
Il fatto più singolare è che I quotidiani Il Tempo, La Repubblica, Il Giornale abbiano, il giorno dopo, riportato l’articolo del NYT.
E’ curioso che le critiche a questo manufatto incredibile partano da così lontano…
L’Architettura del ns.Paese da chi è rappresentata?
Da chi è “criticata”‘?
Vi invito a leggere la newsletter sul sito http://www.AVOE.org iper scoprire ill “mostro del mese”
Alla prossima
DD
Dear Prof. Muratore & Members,
Since 1999, thanks to the Italian Ministry of Culture’s web page (Rassegna Stampa) = http://rassegnastampa.beniculturali.it/Rassegnanew/
I have been able to keep up with the important archaeological / architectural news from Rome pertianing to the work on the Via dei Fori Imperial & and the more recent controversial Ara Pacis project, etc.
But, I am not surprised to read the highly critical review of the Meier ARA PACIS project which was recently published in the NYT (25-09-2006). =
“…the [ARA PACIS] building is a flop is therefore a major disappointment (…) But in its relationship to the glories of the city around it, the building is as clueless as its Fascist predecessors.”
Typically, since late 1999 until the present the NYT as well as many of the other major English-language international newspapers have pretty much done a really poor job of reporting on the important architectual / archaeological projects conducted throughout Rome.
This is when comparing the same amount of news coverage devoted to equally important issues in Rome (urban / architectual planning & vast archaeological work), by the NYT & other international English language newspapers during previous periods of important architectual / archaeological undertakings in Rome (i.e.) the period of Mayor G. C. Argan in the late 1970s early 1980s; the Fascist era in the late 1920s & early 1930s; and the transformation of Rome “Roma Capitali” in the early 1880s to the around 1911, just to name a few.
A much more detailed article about the ARA PACIS Project by Meier was published by: John Seabrook, ROMAN RENOVATION , By: Seabrook, John, The New Yorker, 5/2/2005, Vol. 81, Issue 11
Database: Academic Search Premier
——————————————————————————————————
Can Richard Meier undo what Augustus and Mussolini wrought?
Recent events at St. Peter’s Square, in Rome, have demonstrated,
among other things, the virtues of a piazza. Three million people
entered Rome in the course of about five days, and almost all of
them came to the piazza outside the basilica. Bernini, the piazza’s
main architect, conceived the square (which is actually oval) in the
seventeenth century as a site of pilgrimage, although he might not
have imagined what could happen when Christian zeal is combined with
mass tourism. Nevertheless, apart from a few minor incidents,
everyone in the square behaved. For the people waiting outside it,
in a line to view Pope John Paul II’s body which stretched fo r more
than three miles, the arms of Bernini’s great flanking colonnades
were ahead, like a big stone hug ready to enfold pilgrims and
sightseers alike at the end of their ordeal.
The line snaked across the Vittorio Emanuele II bridge, upriver
along the eastern bank of the Tiber, and almost as Fax as another
square, Piazza Augusto Imperatore. If St. Peter’s Square is a model
for all the good things a piazza can be, Piazza Augusto is an
example of all the things that can go wrong. Instead of the
generously open space of St. Peter’s, there’s a large pile of earth
and rock blocking the middle of this piazza, which houses the tomb
of Augustus, Rome’s first emperor. Its ancient stones are covered
with a ragged crown of cypress trees.
The base of this uncharacteristically neglected-looking ruin has
been excavated down to Year Zero, the street level two millennia
ago, which was eighteen feet lower than the urban surface tod ay; he
area around the base now serves mainly as a toilet for dogs. Above
this pit, on two sides of the piazza are Fascist-style façades of
buildings constructed under Mussolini. On a third side are two
Baroque churches, attached to another thirties building, and on the
fourth side is the monumental sculptural frieze known as the Ara
Pacis, or Altar of Peace, an early masterpiece of Roman art which
was dedicated by Augustus in 9 B.C. If you line it up right, you can
fit two thou- sand years of architectural history and three great
eras of Roman builders (the emperors, the Popes, and the Fascists)
in a single snapshot.
However, while the individual structures are interesting, they don’t
work together. There’s something wrong with the over-all scale of
the square. A piazza can be intimate, like Piazza Mattei, in the
Ghetto, which is just big enough to hold its delightful turtle
fountain, or it can be expansive, like Piazz a Venezia, where
Mussolini staged his big rallies. But whether it serves as the site
of an impromptu soccer game, a political demonstration, or a
pilgrimage, a piazza must always function as a stage for acting out
scenes from the drama of everyday life. On this level, Piazza
Augusto fails completely. It is a dente cariato, a rotten tooth–
abscess in Rome’s idea of its own perfection.
The story of Piazza Augusto Imperatore is a tale of how the city
that invented civic architecture stopped creating it, except at its
edges, where ugly post-war housing developments have spoiled the
once famous campagna romana. It begins more than two thousand years
ago, in the early days of the Roman Empire, with the construction of
the mausoleum of Augustus, and it runs through Mussolini and his
massive new architectural program for Rome with the piazza at its
heart. Now it involves contemporary Roman politics, the celebrated
American architect Richard Meier, and a fervid argument over the
place of modern buildings in Rome.
In 1993, Rome elected as its mayor Francesco Rutelli, a thirty-nine-
year-old star of the left, and, like many previous Roman leaders, he
came to power with an itch to build. Rutelfi’s height, piercing
green eyes, and American-style communication skills earned him the
nickname Clintonino, or Little Clinton. He had a number of plans to
rejuvenate the Eternal City. “I think dries are like languages,”
Rutelli told me. “If a language doesn’t change, grow, and evolve, it
dies. It is the same with cities–a city must be transformed from
time to time.”
One obvious means of effecting that transformation is to commission
a dramatic new building. All the other major European cities have
done this, from Daniel Libeskind’s star-shaped Jewish Museum, in
Berlin, to Richard Rogers’s Millennium Dome, in London, and Richard
Meier’s Museum of Contemporary Art, in Barcelona. Even if people
detest the building (the Dome, for example, was vilified by many
Londoners), they talk about it, and the debate gives the city a
youthful energy that the Colosseum and the Pantheon can’t provide
all by themselves.
Shortly after Rutelli was elected, he was invited by the mayor of
Barcelona, Pasqual Maragall, to see Richard Meier’s museum there,
and he was enchanted by it. The following year, he met Meier, in
Davos, Switzerland, at the World Economic Summit; both were
participating in a seminar on the furore of cities. Afterward, they
spoke about the possibility of Meier’s designing a new museum to
house the Ara Pads, on the west side of Piazza Augusto. Rutelli
wanted the building ready for the Year 2000 celebrations, a major
event in Rome, and he proposed that it would be partially funded by
corporate sponsors, in this case a consortium of three banks that
had support ed other cultural activities in Rome. A time-consuming
competition could be avoided; in fact, there would be no public
review at all. As Rutelli put it, “It was perhaps a risk, but we
wanted to avoid dragging the process out with too long a debate.”
Richard Meier was thrilled with Rutelli’s offer. “It’s every
architect’s dream to build in the center of Rome, partly because it
hasn’t been done for so long,” he told me. Naturally, Meier also
liked Rutelli’s scheme for avoiding a competition. “It was an
unusual situation,” he said. “Normally, in projects of this kind,
you go through a long jury process to select an architect. This was
direct–and to me it seems like the best way.”
Born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1934, Meier studied architecture at
Cornell and made his name by designing residences, most notably the
1967 Smith House, in Darien, Connecticut, on Long Island Sound.
Early in his career, Meier and four other architec ts, calling
themselves the New York Five, proclaimed their allegiance to the
ideas of Le Corbusier and the Northern European tradition of
modernism. According to Le Corbusier, a building should take no
account of its setting and context–the architect should be
concerned only with the formal properties of the structure itself.
Meier favored an industrial aesthetic that was rigorously
minimalist, rejecting all ornamental flourishes except for those
which can be achieved with white paint, glass, and light. Some of
Meier’s contemporaries, notably Michael Graves, later moved away
from these tenets, but Meier has remained steadfastly Corbusian.
Only the scale has changed, as he has progressed from houses to
museums and government buildings. Despite the modernity of Meier’s
style, his buildings are deeply conservative.
In 1973, Meier spent a year at the American Academy in Rome, which
is situated at the top of the Janiculu m Hill, the highest point in
central Rome. “Rome taught me how to treat large interior spaces in
an intimate way,” he said. “The way the light comes in, the way you
experience the space, move through the space–that sense of
promenade. You don’t try. to duplicate that, but you hope you learn
from it. It’s what every architect comes to Rome for, to learn
that.” One of Meier’s favorite buildings in Rome is Sant’ Ivo alla
Sapienza, Borromini’s church off Corso de1 Rinascimento, which is
designed like a six-pointed star. “You can go to Sant’ Ivo when
there are two people, and you can go there when there are a hundred
people, and it still feels intimate.”
Augustus was a sober, culturally conservative Roman it s typical
that one of his first great buildings was his tomb. At the time
Augustus built his mausoleum, it was among the largest structures in
early imperial Rome. an enormous round base of brick clad in
gleaming white m arble, on top of which sat a towering mound of earth
that was planted with evergreens and cypresses, in the style of the
Etruscan tombs. Work on it began soon after Augustus defeated
Anthony and Cleopatra in the battle of Actium, in 31 B.C. As it
turned out, Augustus didn’t need his tomb for forty-two more years,
and during that time he created many other monuments: temples,
aqueducts, colonnades, theatres, roads, and bridges. These were not
only buildings for the religious and political élite but also great
architecture for the masses.
The Ara Pads was commissioned in 13 B.C., to celebrate Augustus’
return from three years of campaigning in Gaul and Spain, where he
had been putting down rebellions and creating the administrative
bureaucracy for the new empire. In form, the Ara resembles the kind
of stone structures that earlier generations of Romans had built as
places for offering sacrifices to the gods, except that it is much
larger, and the carved friezes are among the great masterpieces of
ancient sculpture. The four-sided outer-precinct walls are twenty-
eight feet high, with marble steps leading up to the entrance.
Inside, there is a carved marble altar. The sculptures on the
southern precinct wall depict a religious procession, in which
Augustus and members of his family are shown practicing rites which
were part of Rome’s republican past but had by then been laid aside.
Augustus was trying to make the radical autocracy of the new empire
acceptable to the Romans by combining it with old-fashioned values—
keeping up appearances, respecting mos maiorum (the way the
ancestors did things), and honoring the greatness of Rome.
When Augustus died, in 14 A.D., an ossuary containing his ashes was
placed in a niche within the mausoleum; it remained there until it
disappeared, probably during one of the barbarian sacks of Rome in
the fifth ce ntury. Over the ensuing centuries, the tomb’s marble was
stripped off and employed for other buildings, and the mausoleum was
used for a variety of purposes–as a bear—baiting venue, as a
bullfighting arena, and, from 1908, as the site of Rome’s main
concert hall, which was built on top of the tomb.
In the twentieth century, the piazza became the centerpiece of
Benito Mussolini’s plans for Rome. Just before the Fascist Party
took power, in 1922, Mussolini said, “Rome is our point of
departure, our reference point. It is our symbol, or, if you will,
our myth.” He wanted Italians to see him as a second Augustus, and
to see the Fascist empire, which he proclaimed after conquering
Ethiopia in 1936, as the new Roman Empire. He used both new
buildings and ancient ruins to make his case. “We must liberate all
of ancient Rome from mediocre disfigurements,” he said. “Rome
cannot, must not simply be a modern city in the banal sense o f the
word.”
Near the Colosseum, Mussolini demolished a whole neighborhood, razed
a hill, and cut a wide, straight modern road between the Roman Forum
and the Imperial Forums, the Via dei Fori Imperiali, so that crowds
who gathered in Piazza Venezia to hear him thunder from his balcony
about Italy’s future could do so within thrilling sight of Italy’s
glorious past. Christopher Woodward, in his 2001 book, “In Ruins,”
observes that the remains of ancient Rome can have two opposing
meanings–they can stand for the greatness of Rome, or for the
passing of that greatness, and these interpretations have served
Fascist and Christian ideologies, respectively. Mussolini took the
decayed ruins that inspired artists and poets of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries and turned them into the monumental ruins that
delighted Hitler, when he visited Rome in 1938, and that continue to
draw tourists from all over the world today.
Mussolini scooped Piazza Augusto out of the dense urban tissue of
Rome. He demolished all the buildings within a thousand-square-yard
area around the mausoleum of Augustus, leaving only the two Baroque
churches standing. Two new buildings were added, to form the north
and east sides of the piazza, each fronted by porticoes of squat,
massive columns that recall Mussolini’s pugnacious physiognomy. As
with other Fascist works in Rome, the design was carried out by a
committee of the leading Italian rationalist architects of the day,
closely supervised by I1 Duce himself. Rome’s ancient architectural
vernacular–domes, vaults, cylinders, prisms–was reinterpreted
within the rationalists’ interest in geometrical abstraction, re-
suiting in buildings that were, at their best, modernist and
classical at the same time. The design of Piazza Augusto, executed
by a Jewish architect named Vittorio Ballio Morpurgo, origina lly
called for buildings that were only two stories high, a scale that
worked better with the other elements in the piazza. However, by the
time the buildings were erected they had succumbed to the Fascist
tendency to grandiosity, and swelled to four stories.
When the design for these buildings was finished, Mussolini added
the ideological key to the whole piazza–the Ara Pacis. He had it
moved from its site, near Via del Corso, where it was buried beneath
a sixteenth-century palazzo, and ordered it placed between the
mausoleum and the river. Just as Augustus used Rome’s republican
heritage to lend a sense of continuity to the imperial regime, which
in fact represented the end of that heritage, so would Mussolini use
Rome’s Augustan past to make the Fascist state seem inevitable–
patrimony as destiny.
Morpurgo designed a simple, shell-like building to house the Ara
Pacis–a mostly glass, cement, and travertine structure–with a
flight of travertine steps leading up to it. However, by 1938 Hitler
had forced the passage of the anti-Semitic Racial Laws, and Morpurgo
was not permitted to remain in charge of the building. It was
erected by a committee of engineers who loosely followed his design.
Some archeologists think that Mussolini planned to use Augustus’
mausoleum as his own tomb. But when Mussolini was shot, by
partisans, on April 28, 1945, his body was not interred in Piazza
Augusto; instead, it was hung upside down outside a gas station in
Milan, then buried in an unmarked grave, from which it was stolen by
a Fascist loyalist, and then, after spending some time hidden in a
monk’s cell in a charterhouse outside Milan, it was eventually
reinterred in Mussolini’s home town of Predappio, in Emilia-Romagna,
where the grave has become a popular tourist attraction. The piazza
lost its status as prophecy and became, instead, a monumentally
failed boast.
Meier worked on the drawings for the Ara Pacis project for eighteen
months, designing the building with John Eisler, a senior architect
at Richard Meier & Partners Architects in New York. He designs by
hand, sketching with a 2B drafting pencil and giving finished
drawings to his staff for digital rendering. Meier wanted
something “light, transparent, and inviting,” and also “optimistic,”
a word he often uses to characterize his own work and architecture
in general. “I thought about the imposition Mussolini had made
here,” he said. “It’s an imposition of a will on the environment–
everything about it is huge. The columns axe so massive that the
colonnades read like all solids and no voids. It’s out of scale with
the rest of Rome, which has this very human scale.”
In July, 1996, Meier made an elaborate presentation to city
officials. His proposal looked a good deal like his museum in
Barcelona. It featured a series of loggia-like structures organized
around one wall–a single vertical plane that begins as an eight-
foot wall at one end of the site and grows into the façade of the
building. The Ara Pads would be inside the middle loggia, surrounded
by walls made of massive glass panels, each one weighing twelve
hundred pounds. There was also room for a library, a bookstore, a
café, and an auditorium capable of seating about a hundred and fifty
people. Above the auditorium was a large round skylight, which looks
like a reference to the oculus in the roof of the nearby Pantheon.
It’s not, Meier told me; he doesn’t make historical references in
his work. “It’s a sky-light, for letting light into the room. “The
total budget for the project was around twenty million dollars, a
relatively modest sum, in part because Meier agreed to a fee that
was consistent with the Italian pay scale for architects, which i s
well below what he is paid for his buildings in the United States
and elsewhere.
Before construction began, the building had to be approved by the
city’s superintendent of cultural heritage and by two national
superintendents, for archeology and for architecture. Every city has
its battles between preservationists and developers, but in Rome the
situation is greatly complicated by the fact that there are so many
different Romes to preserve—classical Rome, medieval Rome,
Renaissance Rome, Baroque Rome, eighteenth-century Rome, post-
unification-of-Italy Rome, and Fascist Rome. Each successive Rome is
built on top of (and in many cases out of) previous Romes—more than
two thousand years of history is squashed into dozens of feet of
dense rubble. (You can see these striations of civilization at the
edges of some of the excavations around the city, and they look
almost geological, so thoroughly have the building mater ials and
artifacts been compacted.) This is Roma che Sparisce, or Vanishing
Rome, the underground city that impinges on the surface city in
countless ways, the Rome that Freud was thinking of when he famously
used the city as a metaphor for the human unconscious
in “Civilization and Its Discontents.”
The office of superintendent dates from the Renaissance, when Rome
was still a Papal state and the Church claimed control over all the
ancient buildings and works of art in the city. Pope Leo X’s
superintendent was the painter Raphael. In the fifteen-tens, Raphael
was “prefect of all marble and stone” within ten miles of the
Vatican. Bernini was a superintendent for Pope Urban VIII, in the
sixteen-thirties and forties. He removed the bronze beams that
decorated the ceiling of the Pantheon’s pronaos, melted them down,
and turned them into his overwrought baldacchino, which towers over
the high altar in St. Peter’s Basilica.
Italy became a nation in 1861. Rome was annexed in 1870, and the
Church was forced to surrender oversight of Rome’s cultural heritage
to the state. While ultimate control over the vast array of
archeological and historical sites lies with the national
authorities, their administration was confusingly divided between
the state and the comune, or city government. The state claimed the
Roman Forum and the Palatine Hill; the city took the Imperial
Forums. The national superintendent of archeological heritage got
control over buildings and artifacts that date from before 476, the
official end of the western Roman Empire; the national
superintendent of architectural heritage claimed buildings and
artifacts created after 476; and the city’s superintendent of
cultural heritage became responsible for the city’s museums and
works of art, as well as public gardens and fountains.
Since Mussolini’s death, these superintendents have treated the
centro storico as if it were finished. With so much restoration and
excavation to be done, it didn’t make sense to waste resources on
new buildings. By the nineteen—eighties, this attitude dominated
Roman city planning. “Archeologists have the attitude that there is
nothing you can build in the center of Rome that could possibly be
as interesting as what’s already there, either on the ground or
under the ground,” Francesco Garofalo, an architect in Rome, told
me. “They would rather leave a lot empty, in the hope of one day
excavating it, than allow anything to be built. It’s insane.”
Many of Francesco Rutelli’s attempts to modernize Rome were
frustrated by the superintendent of archeological heritage, Adriano
La Regina. In 1997, for example, La Regina stopped Rutelli from
building a traffic tunnel under Castel Sant’ Angelo, near the river.
The tunnel would have solved one of the bigge st traffic problems in
central Rome–the moat of automobiles that rings the castle and cuts
it off from the surrounding neighborhood of Prati. But La Regina
said no to the tunnel, because he felt that he had not been given
sufficient assurances that the stability of the building would be
preserved by the engineers.
During his twenty-eight years as archeological superintendent, which
ended in January, La Regina was probably the most influential city
planner in Rome, although his influence can be measured mainly in
absences–buildings not built, roads removed, acreage excavated.
When I visited him in his office, in the Roman Forum, the greatest
excavation site in the world, he looked ready for his approaching
retirement. He seemed worn out by long years of defending Vanishing
Rome from the forces of modernity. Raising his glasses and peering
closely at a map of the Roman Forum and the Imperial Forums from
1981, he poi nted with pride to the parks in the Imperial Forums that
he had turned into excavations and to another spot, just below the
Capitoline Hill, where a modern road used to run. “You know in the
film ‘Roman Holiday,’ when Gregory Peck takes the road on his
scooter?” he asked. “We removed it.” It was the only time during our
interview that I saw him smile.
When I asked whether he thought he had been too aggressive in
protecting Rome’s archeological past, citing the frequently heard
complaint that Rome has become a museum of the once great city it
was, La Regina disagreed. “As proof, you only have to look at all
the tourists who come to Rome to see that past,” he said. The
problem, he went on, is with politicians like Rutelli. Politicians
need new roads and construction projects, because such projects
employ potential voters and spread money around. “It is our duty to
say no, when there is a danger to archeological monuments, b ut it
becomes very difficult when you deal with politicians. Because while
tourists bring a lot of money to the city, they don’t vote–so there
will almost always be a conflict there.”
In the late nineteen-nineties, after giving his initial consent to
Meier’s building, La Regina took core samples around the site and
found some limited evidence of ancient structures. The
superintendent took more than two years to study these findings. In
2000, he finally gave his approval for work to proceed, although he
reserved the right to do further excavations after the Morpurgu
building came down. In 2001, he again stopped work, in order to
excavate on the south mad north sides of the site. The contractor,
Fabrizio Di Amato, demanded that the city pay for the cost of
equipment and workers who were now idle. Meanwhile, the
superintendent of cultural heritage for the city of Rome, Dr.
Eugenio La Rocca, had determined that the Ara Pa cis was too fragile
to move; the Meier museum would have to be built around it. The
monument was packed up in protective plywood and scaffolding tubes.
It wasn’t until 2001, a year after the new museum was supposed to
have been finished, that Morpurgu’s building was demolished.
By this time, Rutelli was no longer mayor. He had decided to forgo
the last months of his second term, in order to lead the center-left
coalition against the center-right’s leader, Silvio Berlusconi, in
Italy’s 2001 general election for prime minister. But the contest,
which the press called “il bello cantro il ricco,” the handsome guy
against the rich guy, wasn’t a contest at all–the rich guy won
overwhelmingly. Another man of the left, Walter Veltroni, became
mayor of Rome. He let it be known that he was in favor of Meier’s
building, but he did not have the same personal involvement in the
project that Rutelll had had, and did not make its completi on a
priority.
With the Berlusconi government in power, the antagonists of the
Meier project found a friend in Vittorio Sgarbi, the new under-
secretary to the Minister of Culture. Sgarbi is a conservative art
critic who became a national figure in the nineteen-eighties as a
frequent guest on a popular television show that was a cross between
Charlie Rose and Jerry Springer. It featured Sgarbi’s erudite
discussions of matters of culture combined with outrageous personal
attacks on other guests; Sgarbi delighted audiences by living up to
the meaning of his name–“sgarbato” means “uncivil.” On at least one
occasion he came to blows with his fellow guests on national
television. In the nineties, he had his own show, “Sgarbi
Quotidiani,” or “Daily Sgarbi,” a monologue on current events and
culture.
Sgarbi managed to present Meier’s building as an example of Italy’s
careless attitude toward its heritage. An ambitious leftist
politician and an arrogant world-famous architect were advancing
their own agendas, without public review. “In America, you could
never allow the mayor of New York and Richard Meier to build around
the Statue of Liberty, let’s say, without at least a public review,”
Sgarbi told me, when I went to the apartment where he was residing,
which once belonged to Pope Innocent X and overlooks the Piazza
Navona. “Only in Italy do we allow this.”
Sgarbi also had a number of uncivil things to say about the
appearance of Meier’s building, describing it as “disgusting,” and
calling attention to how incongruous the blindingly white,
industrial-looking building would seem among Rome’s peachy
neoclassical fac¸ades. “It looks more like a gas station in Dallas
than a museum in Rome,” he said. And Meier, after all, was not
solving any of the central problems of the dente cariato; he was
merely applying a glossy white modernist cap.
But with the old Morpurgo building already gone, and the scaffolding
for the Meier building under construction, Sgarhi’s options for
stopping the project were limited. According to Meier, Sgarbi came
to see him and begged him to change some part of the project, so
that he could save face in Italy, but Meier refused.
Sgarbi then demanded that the city excavate for an eighteenth-
century piece of Roma che Sparisce, the Port of Ripetra, which was
once situated under the southwestern end of the site. The port was a
kind of amphibious piazza that featured graceful travertine steps
leading down into the water; the steps were designed by the
architect responsible for the Spanish Steps, Alessandro Specchi. The
travertine had almost certainly been removed when the forty-foot
walls along the Tiber were built, in the eighteen-seventies, and, in
any case, the Lungotevere, the city’s main north-south traffic
artery, wa s now on top of it. Nevertheless, Superintendent La Rocca
eventually agreed to undertake additional excavations. The
negotiations delayed construction another year.
These excavations, La Rocca told me when I went to see him at his
office, in Piazza Lovatelli, in the Ghetto, “determined that there
was hardly anything left of the port down below.” But, just in case,
the superintendents had already asked Meier to eliminate part of the
aesthetically caudal wall, and to change the foundations of the
building so as not to impinge on any possible remains. (The building
now balances on a poured-concrete raft.) “So that in the future,” La
Rocca went on, “if anyone does want to go down and reopen the Port
of Ripetta, they will be able to.”
Thanks, in part, to Sgarbi’s efforts, by 2002 the Meier building had
become an international symbol of the shortcomings of modernism.
Meier may have seen his building as a humanist antidote to the
totalitarian architecture in the piazza, but to its critics the
building represented a different kind of Fascism—the globalization
of the International Style, which has littered the great capitals of
Europe with its cold boxes. Marc Breitman, a well-known French
architect, feared that the Meier building could be “a Pandora’s box”
for a modernist takeover of the historic center of Rome, raising the
alarming prospect of Gehry-style blobs following Meier’s white
boxes. Léon Krier, of Luxembourg, commented, “The municipality’s
decision to rebuild the enclosure around the Ara Pacis in a
modernist style, which is willfully anti-classical, is an act of
provocation of extreme gravity.” In 2002, Samir Younés, the director
of the Rome Studies program at the University of Notre Dame’s
architecture school, published a book of counterproposals for the
site, which also contained many of the arguments against the
building. Younés told me, “A building should take account of the
sense of place. What I object to about the Meier building is that it
is a type of industrial architecture that could be in Barcelona–
indeed, it looks a good deal like the Meier building in Barcelona–
or Atlanta or Athens; it completely denies the sense of place.”
Terence Riley, the chief curator of architecture and design for the
Museum of Modern Art, in New York, argues that Meier was a good
choice for Rome. “Of all the well-known contemporary architects,
Meier is probably the most classical, in the sense of proportion,
and in his sympathy with urban fabric, he said. Roman architecture
has been exported to virtually every corner of the globe–the neo-
classical style is the vernacular for almost all important civic,
ecclesiastical, or commercial buildings from Shanghai to New York–
and to erect barriers that prevent the flow of style from moving the
other way seems capricious.” He added, “I think the attempt to
create a kind of urban taxidermy in Rome is unnatural.”
By the beginning of 2003, it appeared as if the project might remain
entangled in bureaucratic spaghetti forever. The contractor, Di
Amato, was still losing money, and was threatening to make the
superintendents pay. Meier was busy with other buildings, among them
the Jubilee Church on the outskirts of Rome (though Meier’s church
was commissioned after his museum, the Vatican had proved to be a
considerably more pliable client than the comune, and the church was
nearing completion); the museum for the Burda Collection, in Baden-
Baden; and condominiums on Perry Street, in Manhattan’s West
Village. Romans were frescoing the construction walls around the Ara
Pacis site with graffiti.
Meanwhile, a meeting had been arranged for all three superintendents
and some outside experts to discuss the future of the piazza.
Meier’s project manager, Nigel Ryan, and the contractor attended the
meeting as unofficial observers. La Regina also invited Leonardo
Benevolo, the author of “The History of the City” and one of the
most influential postwar Italian urbanisti; in his 1977 book “Roma
Oggi,” Benevolo, a radical conservative, advocated destroying most
post-1870 buildings in the centro storico and replacing them with
parks. The meeting took place in the executive construction trailer
on the site, around a large table. A scale model of the Ara Pacis
museum, made by local architecture students, was in the center of
the table. Someone had placed miniature human figures inside the
modal, to give it a sense of scale; oddly, the figures were dressed
in eighteenth-century clothing. Stephen Natanson, a filmmaker who
has made a documentary about Meier’s Ara Pads project for Italian
television, recorded the proceedings on film.
Shortly after the meeting began, the superintendent of architectural
heritage, Roberto Di Paola, said that he wasn’t satisfied with the
Port of Ripetta excavations, and suggested that the whole piazza be
dug down to Year Zero. Benevolo enthusiastically endorsed Di Paola’s
notion, and recommended tearing down the Fascist buildings, too; he
had brought along sketches showing the piazza without them. La
Regina seemed reluctant to back Di Paola in continuing the dig, in
part because Di Paola had always refused to allow La Regina to
excavate some gardens under his authority in the Imperial Forums.
The contractor then said that if the comune really wished to stop
the project and dig a big hole, the comune was going to have to
reimburse him for all the money he would lose. This diminished Di
Paola’s enthusiasm for the monumental pit, and the meeting broke up
shortly afterward with an informal agreement to allow the work to
proceed. Two months later, the new found ation was poured.
One hot morning last summer, Richard Meier came to Piazza Augusto
Imperatore. He toured the construction site with Superintendent La
Rocca. Construction was far from finished: only the steel frame and
concrete floors were in place. Without the interiors, the structure
looked like a big-box store. The two men walked amid the scaffolding
and piles of rebar, in the heat and dust, trailed by a crowd of
builders, suppliers, designers, and journalists. Meier endured the
attention with an air of noblesse oblige, but La Rocca became
irritated by the scene. When one paparazzo elbowed him aside to get
a picture of il maestro inspecting a sample “Fire Exit” sign, La
Rocca cried, “Non é possibile!”
La Rocca was eager to see the view of the piazza from the roof of
the museum; he had not been up there before. But getting to the roof
required climbing three and a haft flights of construction ladders
and squeezing through the narrow openings at the top of each one.
Meier is seventy and favors his right side when he walks. His snow-
white, Yeatsian-length hair gives him the saintly mien of an artist
in his master years. He had flown to Rome the night before from
Moscow, where he had been meeting with a potential client, and he
was flying back to New York that afternoon. Climbing construction
ladders in the terrible heat was probably not at the top of his fist
of things to do in Rome. He couldn’t squeeze his broad shoulders
through the openings at the top of each ladder without twisting
sideways. After the first ladder, he removed his double—breasted
gray suit jacket. By the time he reached the third ladder his white
shirt was splotched with sweat and his black wingtips were pale with
construction dust.
“You’ve got to be in shape to be an architect,” he said, pausing to
catch his breath.
Emerging finally on the roof, Meier looked at the mausoleum and the
surrounding square, with its two thousand years of building.
Overgrown and unkempt, Augustus’ tomb looked more like a symbol of
Rome’s transience than of its lasting greatness. “Rome reminds me of
a man who lives by exhibiting to travellers his grandmother’s
corpse,” James Joyce remarked, in a letter to his brother, and one
gets this feeling looking at Augustus’ tomb. It represents the
futility of architecture to stave off the inevitable ruination of
all things.
As for the piazza, it is no closer to being a functional public
space than it was before Meier’s building began going up. When he
first got the commission, Meier wanted it to include the whole
piazza, but he no longer felt that way. He wasn’t sure what to do
about the piazza, although he thought the solution might have to be
radical. “Maybe you just cut it all down to street level and start
again,” he told me.
La Rocca moved towar d the shade below; already the ladders were hot
to the touch. But the architect, bareheaded in the sun, continued to
stare out at the forlorn piazza. Finally, Meier started down the
ladders, his legs trembling slightly on the rungs.
At the bottom, the client and the architect went over to look at the
Ara Pacis. It was still boxed up, with the building going up all
around it, poised between being a wreck, a ruin, and the rebirth of
Rome. Four massive poured-concrete columns framed the plywood box.
La Rocca seemed overjoyed with the prospect. “It is as it was,” he
said in a solemn whisper.
“It will be,” Meier agreed.
PHOTO (COLOR): For many Romans, the reaction to Meier’s design for a
museum on the Piazza Augusto was simply “Non fatelo”—don’t build it.
ringrazio chi mi ha dato la possibilità di leggere le parole di Nicolai Ouroussof, che riaprono il discorso sull’Ara Pacis e incoraggiano a invocare il rispetto delle gerarchie naturali del paesaggio cittadino. Le curve del Lungotevere sono al vertice di questa gerarchia e hanno il diritto di espellere ogni oggetto che le possa ferire.
PROF. DR. ARCHITETTO: GIORGIO MURATORE, c/o Suo ” blog ” ROMA.
ORDINARIO DI STORIA DELLA ARCHITETTURA
CONTEMPORANEA NELLA FONDATIVA (1919 ),
SCUOLA SUPERIORE DI ARCHITETTURA DI ROMA,
E DAL1932, DELLA STORICA SEDE DI ENRICO DEL DEBBIO ( 1891- 1973 )
AI PARIOLI-VALLE DELLE ACCADEMIE E DI PAPA GIULIO II°
DELLA ROVERE-MONTEFELTRO.
COMPLIMENTI, PER AVERE PUBBLICATO L’ ARTICOLO ECCELLENTE, da PREMIO ” pulitzer ” a firma di MARTIN G. CONDE in replica al modesto intervento sul NYTIMES di Nicolai OUROUSSOF, su L ” ARA PACIS AUGUSTAE “.
e Complesso Museale di Richard MEIER, Roma Piazza dell’ AUGUSTO OTTAVIANO CESARE, imperatore dei Romani antichi.
vincenzogiuseppe BERTI ( pinello)
Manhattan NEW YORK CITY
Non si sono mai voluti LORO chiamare Five…i Five!Chiedetelo a Drexler o a Colin Rowe…o a Kenneth Frampton…!!altro che Premio Pulitzer per l’articolista!!
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