GECO in Rome: Art or Egotism?

 

The building in the photo is a public market on Via Magna Grecia (we wrote 10 years ago about the market and Morandi), not from the the Basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano. It was designed by Riccardo Morandi, a well-known and admired engineer in his day, whose reputation has since been tarnished by the collapse in 2018 of the "Morandi" bridge in Genoa, which Morandi also designed. The circular parking ramp at the far end of the building--not visible in the photo--is nothing short of lovely. But in light of the Genoa debacle, it has been closed.

The letters at the top/end of the building are not part of Morandi's design. They are work of Lorenzo Perris, a 32-year-old Roman who until 18 months ago was anonymous, known only for the letters GECO--Perris's "tag." Over the last few years, Perris has done his GECO thing on hundreds of buildings, most of them in Rome and some in Lisbon. Sometimes with paint, but more often with paste-ups. The letters on Morandi's building are most likely large paste-ups. He also uses smaller stickers on signs--and anything else he can find to affix them to.  

A GECO sticker on a motor scooter, outside our apartment on  via Tuscolana

Perris, who resides in the Via Prenestina area of Rome, has recently been accused of damaging many of Rome's buildings with his tags. Just how many buildings have been "damaged" is not clear, nor is the extent of the damage, but the legal complaint filed against Perris charges that his work has appeared on the Central State Archive building, on the benches along the Tevere near Porta Portese, on the Arch of Quattro Venti, in Villa Pamphili, in Via Ardeatine, and at the Parco degli Acquedotti (Park of the Aqueducts -- #2 on RST's Top 40), among many others. Authorities claim to have confiscated some 13,000 of his works. 

In the San Lorenzo quarter

The authorities, and the folks at the Rome newspaper Il Messaggero, not only believe Perris's GECOs to be damaging, but they are convinced that his "bombing" is entirely lacking in artistic merit. 

Perris seems to agree with the critics. In 2018, when interviewed during a sojourn in Lisbon--Rome having become too "hot," a place where he was more likely to be caught (and identified), even though he works only at night or at dawn--Perris admitted to being a "bombardier," whose style did not differ from city to city. 

"I want to spread my name," he added, more than to develop and sharpen an aesthetic sensibility. "The prime objective of the aggressor [that is, him] is quantity....My objective is to be everywhere and be seen and known by everyone. I see graffiti as a sport--an illegal one. It's as if I were a superhero; the more one is exposed, the more one must be anonymous. The world of graffiti is pure egocentrism, in my case a veritable megalomania. I want to attract the attention of everyone and to provoke feelings, whether of love or hate."

Bill 

Graffiti GECO, 2020

Round Rome: An Architectural Guide

Architects of all ages have favored square or rectangular buildings; they're easier to design and cheaper to build, and everything from bookcases to sofas fits better against a straight wall than a curved one.  Nonetheless, Rome has its share of round or rounded structures, or structures with distinctive round features.  Some are churches--older ones and newer ones alike--but the modernist architects of the 20th century, with their investments in geometric forms, were also fond of round forms.

Below, RST presents 24 examples of Rome in the round.  If you can identify--by name, general location, or architect--any 10 of them, you can take credit for having a solid knowledge of Rome architecture.  Get 15 and you're ready to guide tours.   Look at the photos and make some notes before reading the text and captions!   Bill



The Pantheon is the mother of all Rome's round buildings. At least this is true chronologically, and the structure has been influential over the centuries in encouraging the city's architects to construct round buildings.

Pantheon, exterior

Pantheon, interior

Other buildings of ancient Rome have round or
rounded features.  The ruins of this Roman bath
are located on Colle Appio.

Churches often have round features--most obviously the dome. The church at the right, probably constructed about 1940, is simply weird.  You can find it--assuming we recall correctly--in Piazza Lecce, intersecting Via Bari, southwest of Piazza Bologna.

This dainty little round building is actually a temple, inside the courtyard of a church. It's called the Tempietto (little temple), and it was designed by Bramante.  Scholars consider it a nearly perfect structure and by all accounts it has been enormously influential for architects.  It's on the Gianicolo, a stone's throw (assuming you've got a major league arm) from the Aqua Paola fountain.  (And Dianne insisted on including it on the stairways walk, one of the 4 itineraries in Modern Rome: 4 Great Walks for the Curious Traveler.)

Santo Stefano Rotondo, exterior

At right, Santo Stefano Rotondo (round).  It was the first Rome church with a circular plan. The original incarnation dates to about 475, but it's been through numerous restorations.  Even so, the interior, especially, is powerfully evocative.  Perhaps because that most famous of round Rome buildings, the Pantheon, was pagan rather than Christian, some scholars--and for a while RST--thought Santo Stefano Rotondo was coverted from a pagan temple.  Nope.  It was always Christian.  (Almost directly south from the Coliseum.)

Santo Stefano Rotondo, interior.

The round church  below--exterior and interior--is on the University of Rome's main campus.  Likethe rest of the campus, it was constructed during the 1930s, when modernism was in fashion in Fascist Italy.  The rounded windows--a common feature of modernist buildings for the period, perhaps referencing ship portholes--add to the effect.  

A 21st-century church on Rome's periphery.

A round, modernist tower graces the church of Gesu Divino Lavoratore in the Marconi district, just off Piazza della Radio. c. 1940s

One of many buildings that make up the Foro Italico (once Foro Mussolini).  To repeat: the architects of the era reveled in geometric forms. The fascinating complex is located on the right bank of the Tevere, just across the river from the big bulge in the Flaminio zone.  In the shadow of Monte Mario.

More rounded forms--and more of that classic red/rose paint. This structure was originally an outbuilding for the Foro Italico.  Today's it's a privately owned business: Officine Farneto.  A two-minute walk from Stadio Olimpico, up via Monti della Farnesina.  You'll walk right into it.  Looks better today than in this photo.

This impressive rounded structure dominates Piazza Bartolomeo Romano, in the Garbatella neighborhood.  The Teatro Palladium (1927) was designed by Innocenzo Sabbatini, who did other buildings in Garbatella.  It was originally a movie house, with apartments behind, and is now a cultural center owned by the Third University of Rome. (Again, part of one of the itineraries in Modern Rome.)






The two buildings below are not round, but they do have round flourishes, round decoration.  The first is just a supermarket, construction date unknown.  The circular decoration fits nicely with the 1950-ish apartments behind the store.  The other building, the Banca Popolare di Milano (1972-73), is standard late modernist box-style--two boxes, actually--but given a bit of style with three round constructions atop the structure. Although it's not a particularly interesting building, the architect is one of Rome's most famous: Luigi Moretti.  Moretti's best-known Rome work is the Casa Della GIL (House of the Italian Fascist Youth, now often referred to as the ex-GIL).  Built between 1933 and 1936, it's a lovely example of Fascist-era modernism.  The ex-GIL is in Trastevere.  (Moretti's best-known work in the US is the Washington, D.C. Watergate complex, which has given us all our "-gate" scandal names, and which has round features.) The bank is just outside the wall at Piazza del Popolo, in Piazzale Flaminio.

Another late modernist structure, just up the road from the bank (above) in Flaminio.  A true classic: Pier Luigi Nervi's Palazzetto dello Sport (1956/57).  Nervi was an engineer as well as an architect, and he had to be to produce this elegant building out of reinforced concrete. Because the roof needs paint, it looks a bit shabby in this photograph.  It's gorgeous at night when there's an event taking place inside.  We wrote about this building and many others in the area in our book, Modern Rome: 4 Great Walks for the Curious Traveler (2014)

We have no idea who designed this building or when.  But we--Bill, especially--loves the lines created by the white fencing around the apartment balconies.  On, would you believe, the current route of the old road, via Latina.

This mushroom-like building is, or was, a dancehall.  This is the back of it.  It's crammed into a small space (obviously) somewhere (we might be hard pressed to find it again) in Appio Latino.

Another mushroom facility.  Not sure what it's for.  Exact location is unknown, but it would be quite close to the intersection of via Boccea and the Circonvalazione Aurelia, near the entrance to Parco del Pineta Sacchetti, in the city's northwest quadrant.

Renzo Piano's Parco della Musica.  Location: Flaminio, just steps from Nervi's Palazzetto dello Sport.

Parking garages don't have to be circular, but Rome has two that are.  This beauty by architect Riccardo Morandi is on via Magna Grecia, just south of San Giovanni in Laterano.  It was built in 1957, and we wonder if it inspired Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim, completed a few years later.

Another parking garage, architect and
date unknown.  Hard to find, because it's hidden
except from one angle.  Location: a few blocks
northwest of Piazza Fiume.  Good hunting!

Not really a round building, but the circular ceiling cutout is so lovely that we couldn't resist. Another Luigi Moretti creation.  Part of the ex-GIL (1933-36) in Trastevere, next to Nanni Moretti's theatre.

Rome's gazometri (literally, gas meters) are among Rome's best-known Rome structures: very visible, and quite strange.
As we understand it, they are essentially shells that once housed and contained large bags of natural gas.  Such structures are not unique to Rome.  In the Ostiense neighborhood.

Above and below, two of Rome's finest staircases in the round mode.  Above, a Luigi Moretti staircase in the ex-GIL (around back on the left, beyond the entrance to the athletic complex).  Below, the staircase that leads up and out of the parking garage beneath the Villa Borghese.  Incredibly, it, too, was designed by Luigi Moretti.   

Maltzan's One Sante Fe: the Rome roots of an LA project

One Sante Fe, Los Angeles.  The cut-out is at center left, one of the parking ramps just beyond.  Note the angled, protuding windows on the upper level.  

He must have been there.  To Rome, that is.  RST ventured to the fringe of Los Angeles' downtown, due passi from the arts district, to see the nearly completed building known as One Sante Fe, after its street address.  We were attracted to the structure by architectural critic Christopher Hawthorne's lengthy and complex review in the LA Times.  While Hawthorne notes that some have seen the enormous building--435 apartments, office space for the staff of LA Metro, a quarter mile [.4 km] end-to-end--as a "kind of gentrification ocean liner, slowly drifting toward dock," his own take is more positive.  "What gives the...project its unusual symbolic power is that it takes the generic stuff of a typical L.A. apartment building--a wood frame slathered in white stucco and lifted above a concrete parking deck--and expands it dramatically to urban scale."

The cut-out, from inside

We loved the sheer size of the thing, the front cut-out/opening [right] that allows access to an interior space created by two wings, the fan-like protrusions for each of the windows, and the two delicious circular parking ramps, one at the end and one in the middle--destined to be painted Calder red, if the model in the sales office is accurate.

The parking ramp.  We hope it gets painted red.  

The architect is 55 year-old Michael Maltzan, once of Frank Gehry's office, and he's the guy we think may have been to Rome.  It's not just that Rome and Los Angeles are both low-rise cities, built close to the ground [LA's has skyscrapers, but they're located in defined districts], or that LA's latest

Architect Michael Maltzan

apartment buildings share the "mixed use" formula--commerce on the ground floor--that has shaped Rome's street ambience for centuries.

Beyond that, Rome has two structures that we couldn't help but think of as we walked the length of One Sante Fe and poked around in its courtyards.  .

Corviale

One is known as Corviale, a massive, horizontal housing complex located southwest of Rome's center, near via Portuense. Completed in the 1980s, the complex has a reputation as a failed experiment in dense public housing--1202 apartments, stretched out over a kilometer.  To be sure, it lacks the complexity of One Sante Fe--the two wings at its southern end, one straight, one bent, the charming urban space in between--and it suffers from a deadly uniformity of color--it's all grey concrete--and design [no cutout, no circular parking ramps]. One would never call it playful.

Even so, Corviale's linear monumentality, unique as far as we know, lends it credibility as a predecessor of One Sante Fe.

Morandi's Metronio Market, rear 

The other Rome building is Riccardo Morandi's Metronio Market, completed in 1957.  It has two features that link forward to Maltzan's structure. One is the angled windows on the long facade, not unlike the much more subtle protusions of the LA building.

Ramp's the key 

The other, more obvious, is its stunning circular parking garage: shades of Luigi Moretti's ex-GIL staircase in Rome--check it out on the blog--and of Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim.  And now of Maltzan's One Sante Fe.

We can't confirm, yet, whether Maltzan has ever been to Rome, or even Italy.  Among his influences are Alvar Alto and Le Corbusier, neither Italian.  Yet Maltzan's firm has designed for a Milan project, and his work has appeared at the Venice Biennale.  More germane, he acknowledges deep familiarity with Palladio's 16th-century Italian villas and an especially strong affinity for the forms and spaces of Francesco Borromini's Baroque Roman church, San Carlo delle Quattro Fontane.  Of course, he may have just seen it in a book.   Bill

The One Santa Fe Fantasy

"Googie" architecture: in Rome

If you've spent time in Los Angeles, or Las Vegas, or even Seattle, you'll have some knowledge of "googie" architecture, even if you don't know the name.  Associated with the 1950s, the style features a futuristic feel, produced by sharp and odd angles, sweeping arches, boomerang and pallette

Gas station, Los Angeles

shapes, zig-zag lines, and atom motifs.  In Los Angeles, where it took its name from "Googies," a coffee shop designed by modernist architect John Lautner, it is usually found in gas stations, fast food restaurants, and coffee shops, though there's a superb example at LAX, the city's main airport, where the Theme Building, completed by Pereira and Luckman architects in 1961, greets visitors with its space-age glow.

Italy had its boom years, too, but it didn't participate with quite the same intensity in the catalysts of the googie moment--the space age and the era's car culture--and so outstanding examples of the style, especially in Rome, are few.  In fact, the word "few" may overestimate.  Still, googie enthusiasts might have some success in the San Giovanni area, easily accessed by the Metro, where a construction boom in the 1950s and 1960s yielded several buildings with some relationship to Googie.

Garage, Metronio Market

Back of Metronio Market

Two are on via Magna Grecia, a major thoroughfare running south from the San Giovanni Metro stop.  As you walk south, the first you'll come across is Ricardo Morrandi's Metronio Market.  Its outstanding feature is the playful circular garage, but the two long sides of the triangular facade are also of interest, with their accordion-like window treatments.  The market opened in 1957.

Piccadilly Hotel, once a movie theater

Another, a bit further along, is the lower facade of what is now the Piccadilly Hotel, and was once a movie theater: the googie is in the dark forms which bore the name of the cinema and in the multi-angled canopy below. (The closed cinemas are the protagonists in an Italian film, "Fantasmi Urbani: Inchiesta sui cinema chiusi da Roma" - "Urban ghosts - An investigation into Rome's closed cinemas". You can see a trailer on YouTube - look for hints of googie.)

Across the street, still on via Magna Grecia--perhaps across from the market--you'll see a 1960-vintage apartment building, sandwiched between two structures in the more-familiar neo-classical style.  The angled balconies participate in the "googie" mode.

Not the best photo for this purpose. The "pallette" ceiling
is upper left.  

Continuing south on via Magna Grecia, turn right on via Gallia.  In the second block, on the left side of the street, just past the church, is Bar Clementi.  It's a great place for a coffee--it was our regular coffee bar for two months--and one doesn't have to pay extra to sit down.  And while you're there, note the pallette-shaped ceiling, right out of a googie textbook.  Ceilings such as this one, which invoke the space age, are quite common in Rome bars.

Angled balconies, via Gallia

Exiting Bar Clementi and continuing west on via Gallia, you'll find another set of cleverly angled
balconies.  Another tribute to googie.

Bill

A hint of "googie" in the shape of the shields for the lettering
of a dancehall, "Stellarium," in Appio Latino, 2008

Rear of the Appio Latino dancehall, with its mushroom roof