Rome's "Other" Pantheon: Julio Lafuente's Little-Known Gem Is Now Decathlon

 

A rather weird interpretive perspective on the Air Terminal Ostiense. The ancient ruins in the foreground certainly don't exist where they are portrayed here, and never did. The composite photo
seems a superficial effort to recuperate certain ancient forms.

Many Romans will have experienced architect Julio Lafuente's Air Terminal Ostiense building, if only because since 2012 it's been the Rome home of Eataly. Eataly may have saved the structure from demolition, but damaged it by converting its enormous, hangar-like space into several department-store like floors. Today, it resembles a post-modern mall. (See photo, right.)

Decathlon's version 

Across the street from Eataly there's a more modest, circular building (see above)--so modest, in fact, that hardly anyone seems to know that it, too, was designed by Lafuente. Indeed, both buildings were designed for the 1990 soccer World Cup. The building's reputation may have suffered from its history. For a while it was occupied by a toy store--Rocco Giocattolli ("Rocco Toy Store"). Later, it was known by the letters that graced its roof--Balocco, a variety store that was a dark, messy, and somehow gloomy place that sold a variety of items nobody would ever want (and that we wrote about in 2016, not knowing the building was by Lafuente). See photos below.

Balocco, 2016. The elevator may have been original to the building.

We're surprised that this smaller building has received so little attention, because it has a back story that puts it at the heart of Rome's history.

Born in Madrid, Spain, Lafuente emigrated as a child to France. As a young man, he studied architecture in Paris, returning to Spain in 1941, when the Germans occupied the French capital and much of the country. Soon after the war ended, Lafuente returned to Spain to continue his studies. His education complete, he intended to travel to the United States, but instead opted for the "Grand Tour" of Italy, aboard a BMW motorcycle.

When he arrived in Rome, his life changed. Just a tourist at that point, he encountered the Pantheon. He was overcome by the building: its shape, and especially the oculus, which bathed the interior in natural light. 

In 1990, he took his Pantheon experience (adding a dash of the Coliseum) and used it to design his own Pantheon. Like the Pantheon, it's round. And, like the Pantheon, it has its own version of the oculus--a glass ceiling (and partial glass walls) that bring in natural light. It's now an outlet for one of the big box stores of sporting goods chain Decathlon, which has restored much of the building's architectural presence. From Pantheon to Decathlon.

Lafuente's 1990 structure. Now (above) a Decathlon store. 

And here's the rest of the story. Much taken with the Pantheon and with the city's roster of fine modern architects, Lafuente decided to make Rome his home. In looking for work, he visited the studios of Ludovico Quaroni, Mario Ridolfi, and the prolific Luigi Moretti (whose best known building may be the Watergate complex, in Washington D.C.). His search ended at the Studio Monaco-Luccichenti, where Lafuente felt most accepted. 

Lafuente had a distinguished career as a creative modernist, designing a number of buildings in Rome and environs as well as the Middle East. Among his best-known works is the Tor Di Valle Hippodrome, designed for the 1960 Rome Olimpiad. [His studio's website is still accessible - his daughter, Clara - still maintains the architectural practice -  and has many more photos of his work.]

We were first introduced to the Spanish-Roman architect in 2006 when there was an exhibition at Istituto Cervantes on Piazza Navona, celebrating his 50 years of his work. Lafuente was there; he was very congenial; and we had a great talk with him that opened our eyes to his works in Rome.

Hippodrome, Tor di Valle, 1959 (now "ex [former] ippodromo Tor di Valle")

Lafuente's 1980 Esso building (below), in the business park Parco dei Medici, will be familiar to anyone traveling the limited-access road to the Fiumicino airport. In June, our driver pointed out the building and explained how much he liked it. We think it's spectacular--one of the most interesting and innovative structures in Rome's orbit (we tried - and failed - to get inside it).

Among Lafuente's other area buildings are the offices of SAIE, on viale della Letturature 30, in EUR; Villa Fiorito (1965), an apartment house in the Aurelia Quartiere (via di villa Betania, 31 [photo below]; the Rome Church of Scientology (off via della Maglianella 375--Google street views suggests that the church is not visible from the road and is likely not open to the public); and the Stabilimento Ferrania (1959), a storied company famous for making the celluloid which the great neorealists used, active until the early 2000s [photo below]. The Rome complex, which Lafuente designed, is at via Appia Nuova 803, now part of Autocentro Balduina (an enormous car sales and service organization, with multiple outlets).

Villa Fiorito, Quartiere Aurelia 

Stabilimento Ferrania, 1959

Julio Garcia Lafuente died in Rome in 2013, at age 92. 

Bill 

Suburban Surreal II: Parco dei Medici and the Esso Building

The first non-stop sunny day in weeks sent us off on one of our treasure hunts today (May 18), and we didn't return empty handed. After gassing up the scooter, we headed into Rome's core on two errands related to the marketing of Rome the Second Time. Both were reasonably accomplished,
though not without suffering the Centro's traffic; we were astonished at the difficulty of finding a legal parking place (and in the end, we didn't, in part because authorized scooter places were occupied by Rome's smaller commercial vehicles, as in the photo at right).

Afterward, from near Piazza Colonna we headed out to the Tevere, then toward the south end of the city, through the Marconi district and around Piazza Meucci to via Magliana, a curvy, 2-lane thoroughfare that more or less tracks the river as it winds through middle-aged suburbs and aging commercial and industrial sites.
On the way, we stopped to admire a curious structure, the "Ponte sull'autostrada [bridge over the thruway] Roma-Fiumicino alla Magliana" as it's referred to in one of the architectural books, or the "Viadotto [viaduct] alla Magliana," in another. Although the 1965 "bridge" appears to be without purpose, we later learned that it's an important work of civil engineering. It's there because the highway, forced at this point onto unstable, wet ground near the Tevere, required the structure as a way of stabilizing the pilings below its center. At the end of the span to the right, a massive, pontoon-like counterweight (not visible) drives the center columns down, holding everything in place. The process is known as the "Morandi Method," after the engineer.

Our goal was a building we had seen from the Fiumicino expressway. Occupied by the Esso corporation, designed by architect Julio La Fuente, and opened in 1977, it's a unique, even bizarre structure. We were surprised to find that it's located in an enormous industrial park, Parco dei Medici, named after the Medici family of Florentine fame. Besides the Esso building, the park contains about a dozen large and decidedly ordinary corporate structures, housing businesses we'd never heard of, with names like "Syngenics" and "Corpoform." An abandoned building was once home to Erikson, the phone maker whose business has fallen on bad times. Security is tight; every building is surrounded by hundreds of discrete concrete posts, forming a fence that's both effective and graffiti-resistant, and it's impossible to enter any of these corporate sanctuaries without some sort of clearance. We imagine hundreds of employees in every building, busily at work in secret laboratories on the next Italian household appliance that looks great but fails in the first week. Outside, small groups of men in dark suits stroll the sidewalks on their lunch hours, trapped in (or enjoying) corporate Pleasantville.

La Fluente's Esso building makes the trip worthwhile. It's rugged and physical yet light and magical, mixing the bold earnestness of the Aztec with the a sense of playfulness straight out of children's building blocks.
The big white beams seem to have a function, to hold the structure together, but it's not clear that they do anything of the sort; they might be made of plastic, or rubber, as if they were part of a kit of toy parts, fresh out of the box. Who knows? With our best Italian, we try to talk the guard at the gate into giving us five minutes inside to look around (we tell him we're authors of a book on Rome, the building's a structure of historic importance, and bla bla). He's sympathetic and calls his supervisor, but the answer is no.

To the south of the Esso building, and of moderate interest, is a spa/restaurant complex (below left), complete with pool and a "private" club: perks available to the traveling businessman. And aross the way, nicely designed apartments with circular balconies for those who find the nearby Holiday Inn not quite nice enough.

We're off, back on the nasty, treacherous via Magliana, all trucks and busses and traffic and potholes. An old road-house restaurant beckons, and we pull over. "Tavernaccia," it's called, and uncleared bottles and dishes make it clear that lunch is no longer being served on the large veranda, which is only a few feet from the street but protected from the noise and dirt by massive screens.
Still, the blond proprietress has no problem in providing a mezzo litro of vino bianco (E2), which we sip while noting the Christmas-motif tablecloths. The door to the restroom is covered with wallpaper designed to resemble bricks. Later, when we gave the owner our book card and asked for the restaurant's bigliettino (business card), she complied by writing the name and phone number on a piece of paper, but seemed preoccupied with playing the gaming machines inside.

Bill