Buon Pastore: Armando Brasini's complex Convent

The elegant, complex structure below opened in 1933 as a convent, to house the local congregation of the Suore di Nostra Signora della Carita' del Buon Pastore di Augiere; it is known familiarly as "Buon Pastore."  It still exists, but not quite as it appears in the photo.  The "guglie" (spires, of stone) that graced the building in its first four decades were torn down in the 1970s. There was decay, and safety was surely an issue, because the building was still in use.  But there's more to it than that.

The decade of the 1970s is perhaps best remembered architecturally for its fascination with concrete, and the "brutalist" structures--some of them fluid and remarkable, others stolid and grim--that came with its use. More than that, the architect of Buon Pastore, who died in 1965, was not then much remembered nor much respected, and his reputation, or lack of it, surely had something to do with the decision to demolish, rather than repair, the spires.

Armando Brasini

Today it would be different.  Armando Brasini has an admiring following these days, and those who care about Rome's architectural heritage are increasingly aware of his contribution to the city, which include the entrance to the Rome zoo (1909-1910), Villa Flaminia (his own residence, 1920-1925), Ponte Flaminio (begun 1933), a significant church at Piazza Euclide, and the magnificent Palazzo INAIL (1926-1933), on which he collaborated with Bruno Zevi. (He also designed a church in Buffalo which had to be torn down because of deterioration; some say he didn't understand Buffalo winters.)

Ponte Flaminio, photo from 1960s

Decades after his death, he has been justly compared to the more famous Gino Coppede', who like Brasini experimented with an eclecticism that anticipates postmodernism: the delicious combining of historical styles from the Renaissance, the baroque period, and the medieval era.  Coppede' deserves the lavish praise bestowed on the neighborhood/community in Salario that bears his name.  But no single building of his approaches the breathtaking monumentality of Brasini's Buon Pastore.

The complex, monumental, front entrance. What style is it?

Work began on Buon Pastore in 1929, and the building was opened in 1933, but construction was not completed until 1943, in the midst of the war.  In its early years the building functioned simply as a convent with chapel.  The world war brought change.  Although the nuns remained, the building also served as a military hospital--1500 beds--through the war years, first for the Italian wounded, then for the occupying Germans, then, briefly in 1944, for the American forces.

Interior courtyard, Sant'Ivo-like cupola

Courtyard detail

Courtyard, from above, looking toward front

Dome closeup

Walkway detail

In August 1945 Buon Pastore became a home for the "re-education" of adolescent girls, including 20 from Laurentina, an area destroyed during the war, and 10 from a building on via della Lungara (now the Casa Internazionale delle Donne).  The left side of the building remained a hospital (it closed in 1964), and the right side was given over to rooms for the nuns and the girls.  By 1953 there were 60 girls receiving assistance and treatment at the facility.  In 1955, Buon Pastore housed a scuola media (middle school) for girls in the quartiere, known as "Roma Gianicolense."  Since 1969 it has housed a variety of scholastic institutes.

While shockingly diverse stylistically, what appears to be a rambling, oddly shaped building is also perfectly symmetrical.  The "arms" of the building house separate (and, of course, symmetrical) cortili (courtyards), intended to bring in air and light.  The central courtyard is especially impressive.  According to one authority, the cupola replicates the cupola of Sant'Ivo alla Sapienza, Borromini's 17th-century baroque masterpiece.  On special occasions, it is still possible to climb out and around on the roofs of the building.

Symmetry

Our tour at dome level.  Great place for a cocktail party.

Brasini's powerful and yet myterious building has attracted the film industry; at least a dozen films have been shot there, including Una Vita Violenta (1962), based on the novel by Pier Paolo Pasolini; Il Cartaio (2004), directed by the Italian master of horror, Dario Argenta; and Il Papa' di Giovanna (2008), a Pupi Avati production.

Buon Pastore is at via Bravetta 383, about 3 miles SSW of the Vatican.  The interior is accessible only on special occasions, such as the spring program Open House Roma, in which we participated.  The exterior, worthy in its own right, can be circled any time.  The photos below are from a 2016 visit.

Bill

Inevitable selfie, from highest accessible point, above the entrance

Architect Gino Coppedè in Rome's Center

We've blogged about the 20th century architect Gino Coppedè several times, and included his Quartiere Coppedè at #20 on our RST Top 40 list.  It took us a few years, however, to discover that one of Coppedè's signature buildings is right in the Centro Storico, off Piazza Barberini.  This large palazzo, at via Veneto no. 7, is not his best, in our opinion, but it offers insight into this particular (in the Italian sense of the word) architect if you can't make the trek out to the Quartiere.

classic Coppedè sculptural detail

You can peak inside too.

The palazzo, built in 1927, the year Coppedè died, has his signature sculptural effects and, like Coppedè, defies categorization.  Coppedè has been variously described as an architect in the Art Nouveau, "Liberty" ( a particularly Italian designation falling between Art Nouveau and Art Deco, we think), and barocchetto traditions.  For many years his architecture was not highly valued in Rome.  He was seen  mostly as idiosyncratic.  But there has been a rehabilitation of his reputation, and the Quartiere Coppedè is now a highly prized, and very expensive, residential area.

One of the paired via dei Ramni buildings in the San
Lorenzo district

Not too far out of the Centro, in the San Lorenzo district, are two more Coppedè buildings we had never noticed until recently.  They are on via dei Ramni, a block from the University (La Sapienza).  As of this March, an apartment in one of them was for sale.  See the video here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21aOIwsjSmM

Back to Piazza Barberini and via Veneto:  there is no dearth of visual stimuli - Bernini's Triton fountain, his bee fountain, the Capuchin crypt nearby that was a subject of a recent post, the Cinema Barberini designed by Marcello Piacentini, the Hotel Bernini Bristol with its rooftop bar, a view of Palazzo Barberini.  But, if you take time to look up at the corner of via Veneto and Piazza Barberini, we think you'll find the view worthwhile.

Look up at the corner.

And a reference to Fascism

Dianne
See also a nice photo essay in English at this site:  http://photographictravelsinitaly.blogspot.com/2009/06/coppede.html

The Trieste Quarter: Home to Modernism and Postmodernism

The quartiere of Trieste, to the north of Rome's center, between via Salaria and via Nomentana, is best known to tourists and architectural enthusiasts for the extraordinary collection of electicism known as Coppede', after the architect, Gino Coppede', who designed the unusual structures in the 1920s.

But there is more to Trieste than Coppede'.  As a relatively young and wealthy quartiere, Trieste also has a number of worthy modernist--and postmodernist-buildings.  Indeed, we found two at one intersection, where via Salaria crosses via Adige (on one side) and via Bruxelles (on the other).  We call it Trieste, but to be precise, one side is in Trieste, the other in Parioli. 

On the southeast corner of the intersection is a 1930s-era modernist building, architect unknown, but worthy of Luigi Moretti.  It's a narrow, asymetrical structure, sited on an oddly-shaped piece of land. 

An unusual round open loggia

It now houses the Sri Lankan embassy, which recently installed a Buddha in the white loggia, above.

The building makes substantial use of the open logia, including an unusual round open loggia.

Even more unusual, and doubtless more controversial among architects and architectural historians, is an apartment building on the intersection's northwest corner.

Built in the 1960s or 1970s (we would guess), it's modern but not modernist,  playful in a postmodern, experimental way: the vortex-like stanchion at the corner (left), the hole on an upper floor, a projecting cap at roof level, the intersecting of unusual shapes. 

Postmodernist play with shapes and forms

When you've seen Coppede'--and don't miss it (it was number 20 on RST's Top 40)--have a look at this intersection.  It's only a 5-minute walk.

Bill

The Gates of Rome: The Postwar Era

Some of these gates are best seen--and photographed--at night. 

A window barred--but elegantly, c. 1910

From the point of view of crimes against the body, Rome is a safe city, with very low numbers of assaults, rapes and murders.  Property crime--things like thefts on the bus, breaking and entering with intent to steal the television set--is more frequent.  Romans--and Italians generally--are understandably anxious about property crimes and eager to protect their homes from invasion.  Hence Romans prefer the upper floors of apartment buildings, where they feel--and are--less vulnerable, and those who must live on the ground or first floor commonly install bars on windows. 

Fenced in, completely

Some have been known to fence in an entire terrace or balcony (right).  Portieri--the guys who sit in little rooms ready to jump out and prevent you from snooping around in that lovely interior courtyard--are less common than they once were, but they're still at work here and there, and they still serve as a deterrent to crime in many buildings.   If a thief does manage to get to your front door, he must deal with multiple sets of multiple-bolt locks on an order that even a hardened New Yorker would have trouble imagining.  Opening one of these doors with the keys requires not only a good memory--for which key fits which lock,  which of the locks, if any, is a fake, which lock to unlock first, how many turns to make--but also a non-arthritic wrist and some time to waste. 



A fanciful gate, in Coppede'

This concern for home safety has one benefit (well, maybe more than one): the iron gates that guard many buildings--the first line of defense, especially in the absence of a portiere--are works of art.  Some are centuries old, veritable masterpieces of the Italian renaissance.  Others, as in the Coppede' neighborhood in the quartiere of Trieste, evoke the medieval sensibilities of Gino Coppede', the architect who built the area, or offer a touch of the "liberty"/art nouveau style that was in vogue in the decades before and after 1900. (The Coppede' neighborhood came in at #20 on RST's Top 40.)

Then there are the modern gates of the between-the-wars Fascist period, with their strong vertical and/or horizontal lines.  No nonsense. 










Here's another, from the 1920s, with touches of the medieval: that spear to the right, the grate-like general appearance.  Nestled in the center, the modernist letters CP (Case Popolari/Public Housing).  This gate is in the planned community of Garbatella (RST's #16 on its Top 40), south of the center. 







And after the war?  Nothing worth looking at, right?  Wrong.  We (and that really means Bill, that master of the perverse perspective) have been enjoying the gates and doors of the 1950s and 1960s.  Yikes!  At least that's when we think they were made; they don't come with dates. 

Angles, colored glass, lovely shadows.  Note the floor.  This
gate is "busier" than most.  You can see it in Piazza Vescovio.

They're easy to recognize: they're "modern" in the sense that they (usually) aren't busy with detail, and they don't resemble Victorian wallpaper.  But the designers of these postwar examples have moved on just a bit from the stark lines favored in the Fascist era.  Lines are bending (photo at top).  New angles.  Playfulness.  One senses a search--not always successful, we admit--for something beyond the stark order of modernism.









Playful, yet bold and powerful.  Straight out of the 1950s, and strong and masculine.  In postwar, modern Garbatella, not far from the Metro. 

Sensational.  Gorgeous.  You could be in Miami Beach.  But it's Monteverde. 

We found this gem in the quartiere of Trieste, while walking to our
apartment from Piazza Bologna.  Wasted on a parking lot, but dazzling.
We're thinking Buckminster Fuller's Geodesic Dome. 

There's Fuller with his dome. 

Bill






 

RST Top 40. #20: The Strange World of Coppede'

It was not long after we met in the winter of 1993--he was a graduate student in my class in the American Studies Department at the University of Rome, La Sapienza--that Massimo realized that Dianne and I had rather odd touristic tastes; while we enjoyed the standard fare, we savored the funky and unusual. And so began a series of journeys, with Massimo presenting some of his native Rome's more curious sites. On one occasion, we motored around the city in the morning darkness in pursuit of all-night bakeries, where we ordered our pastries directly from the baker, through a back door. On another--a dreary, rainy day--Massimo drove me to an early modernist shopping center somewhere on the fringe of the city, a place so little known he's forgotten he took me there and that I've been unable to locate.

And then there was Coppedé. It was nearing midnight when Massimo stopped the car in a piazza somewhere in the the north of Rome, and we got out. My first impression--and hardly an original one--was of an architecture both playful and, at that hour, menacing (the piazza appears in Dario Argento's 1980 horror film, Inferno)--and, above all, original. I had never seen anything like it anywhere--echoes of Spain's Gaudi, perhaps, but much more, too--and certainly not in Rome. And that's why it's #20 on Rome the Second Time's Top 40. The piazza's Palazzina del Ragno (spider) is at upper left. Below right, that's Dianne in her Fidel cap, demonstrating the playful side of Coppedé.

There is much more to it than I saw that night: 15 buildings by the architect Gino Coppedé, for whom the Quartiere Coppedé is named, and some 40 buildings in all, amounting to what one critic has described as an "urban hallucination." Despite the name, Coppedé is not an official "quarter." It's actually at the southwest end of Quartiere Trieste, 2 blocks northeast of Piazza Buenos Aires, which is on viale Regina Margherita, and about 4 blocks west of via Salaria.

It would be delightful to come across Coppedé by chance, as writer Martha Pichey did in 1987, compelled to make sense of the lions' heads, Latin inscriptions, giant bees, and other decorations that, well, don't make much sense. For the majority who prefer to plan, perhaps the best entrance to the area is through the massive arch on via Dora,
not far from Piazza Buenos Aires. Start there, move on to Piazza Mincio (where Massimo took us), then amble. There are other Coppedé works on via Brenta (#s7, 9, 14 and 16), via Ombrone (#8-10, 11), via Serchio (#2) and via Olana (#7). The forest is lovely, but don't miss the trees: the gates, fences, ceramic urns, winged serpents, hanging lanterns, a sundial, and other ornamentations that lend Coppedé that air of weird excess. One way to enjoy the area is to try to pick out elements of the great variety of styles Coppedé employed, including baroque, Moorish, gothic, Renaissance, and--yes--Babylonian. The photos below are of Piazza Mincio's Villino delle Fate (fairies), so named because of its extravagant decoration.

There is no easy accounting for what Gino Coppedé accomplished here, but it won't hurt to know something about the architect. He was born in Florence in 1866, where his father had a workshop, Casa Artistica, where Gino and his brother learned to carve the decorative flourishes that Firenze's upper class favored for their fireplaces and armoires. By age 24 he had combined that practical training with two advanced degrees: one from the Professional School of Industrial and Decorative Arts, another from the city's Academy of Fine Arts. Coppedé's first home project was outside Genoa, where a Scot, Evan McKenzie, hired him to "reconstruct" his substantial villa.
Completed in 1904, the conversion brought him instant recognition and s spate of other home projects for ambitious and intrepid Genoese elites. The Rome adventure began in 1919, when Genoese financiers, familiar with his work, hired him to design 18 palaces and 27 smaller villas--early condominiums, essentially, designed to be sold to civil servants and professionals. By 1926, less than half had been built. Aside from the Quartiere, Coppedé had only one other Rome commission--a simpler building at 7 via Veneto, completed in 1927, the year he died.

Most scholars would describe Coppedé's work as an example of art nouveau (called liberty in Italy), while noting that that the Quartiere's bold and extravagant use of the style is in a certain way perverse, given that construction took place long after art nouveau had reached its peak and while modernists forms and expressions were in ascendancy in architecture and design.

One authority notes that Coppedé's version of nouveau rejected the sexualized motifs common in France and Germany for playful but more stolid and moral expressions having appeal to Italy's middle class.

At the risk of scandalizing our architectural-critic readers, it seems not unreasonable to use the word "postmodern" to describe the quartiere. Although "postmodern" is usually employed to mark the decline of pure modernism and the rise of a more eclectic style of pastiche in the 1970s, it could be argued that Gino Coppedé was there first, toying with an emergent modernism, holding the nascent rationalism of Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus at arm's length while insisting on the vibrant variety of architecture's history.


Bill