Balocco: Big-Top Architecture in Rome

Weird inside and out.  It's Balocco, also known as Rocco Balocco, and it's usually described as a toy store, but also as a seller of baby gear and furniture.  You could buy clothes there, too.

If you've been to Eataly in Ostiense, you've seen the funky building, because it's only a few meters from Eataly's main entrance, across the street.

Last spring we sucked it up and went inside (knowing we weren't thinking about buying anything) and took a few photos.  Other-worldly one might say.  Circus architecture (as if that were a thing). 1980s??  Zany postmodernism?

Gloomy interior.  Odd, given the abundance of natural light. 

A Roman friend said this Balocco is one of several in a small chain of stores, and that the chain had been for sale for years and is now on its last legs.  One internet site claims it's closed, another suggests it's open.

Run, don't walk--to Balocco!

Bill

The postwar American Academy in Rome: Incubator for Modern Architecture

Writing in the latest issue of American Academy in Rome Magazine, 2015 Fellow Denise R. Constanzo examines how the Academy, located in a city better known for its ancient monuments and baroque churches than sleek, modern buildings, survived the rise of postwar architectural modernism.


 "Rome and the classical legacy promoted by its academies," she writes, "were antithetical to modernism's emphasis on industrial materials, abstract forms, and progressive politics.  Constanzo continues:  "Many of Rome's own modernist developments were ideologically problematic, because they enjoyed considerable Fascist support.  After World War II, when modernism gained widespread official sanction, the Rome Prize appeared irrelevant, perhaps even perilous, to an architect's career."



"How, exactly," asks Costanzo, did the Academy survive?  The answer, she argues, is that the American Academy, unlike its French and British counterparts, left its Fellows free to explore Rome's diversity, "eliminating all work requirements in favor of independent projects with minimal oversight."

Venturi: Sainbury wing of the National Gallery, London (1991).
A meeting of modernism and classicism--i.e., postmodernism.

There's a good deal of truth in that explanation, but it's not the whole story.  It would seem to be relevant to Robert Venturi's 1957 experience as an Academy Fellow.  As the title of his brilliant and influential 1966 book, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, would suggest, Venturi reveled in Rome's urban and architectural ambiguities, its tensions and paradoxes, its "messy vitality."

Quaroni poster for E42

I would add, nonetheless, that Rome's architecture was not as far out of the mainstream as Constanzo might claim. Eero Saarinen was not in the least reluctant to fashion his entry in a 1948 competition (what would become the St. Louis Arch) along the lines of a similar arch drawn by Ludovico Quaroni for E42, an enormous exposition designed to commemorate the 1922 March on Rome.  At the very least, Saarinen was likely familiar with the imperial meaning of Italian arches, dating to antiquity and running through Fascism, and that knowledge fazed him not at all as he prepared his contest submission.

Just as important, elements of Rome's diverse architectural heritage contained the seeds of two strands of American postwar architecture: postmodernism and brutalism. With its weighty mass and its affection for unforgiving, uniform facades of reinforced concrete, the brutalist movement that

Fascist-era office building, viale Castro Pretorio, Rome.  A precursor of brutalism--and perhaps postmodernism, too.  

began in the late 1960s owed much to the ponderous office buildings of the Fascist-era, though the latter used marble and stone.

Michael Graves, Steigenberger Hotel, Egypt 

Postmodernism, with is pastiche of forms, its penchant for mixing and matching architectural styles and elements, was eclectic Rome itself, full of juxapositions and the "complexities" that Venturi so admired.  It was the sort of place where Michael Graves--also a Rome Prize recipient (1962)--could begin to imagine his Portland Building, the Steigenberger Hotel in El Gouna, Egypt, the Humana Building in Lousiville, or any of a number of his other "postmodern" buildings.

Bill

Pompidou Postmodernism--in Rome

Not Columbus, not 1972

Our introduction to postmodernism came, in of all places, Columbus Ohio--not, or not then, a pacesetter in architecture.  We were tourists, and we arranged to eat dinner in one of the city's trendy new restaurants.  The place occupied a long-narrow space several feet below street level, and everything was painted black.  To our surprise, the resturateur and his designer had made only the most minimal effort to cover up the "guts" of the place--the ductwork and electrical cables that made the place function, the old brick.  No lowered ceiling, no styrafoam ceiling panels, no wall paneling.  Painted black, yes, but hardly invisible; indeed, right in your face.  It was 1972 or 1973. 

Pompidou Center

Across the Atlantic, and doubtless unaware of Columbus's early lead in advanced architectural design, Renzo Piano and his colleagues were working on Paris's Pompidou Center.  It would open in 1977 to considerable acclaim and be understood thereafter as a seminal work in the postmodern vein. 

More Pompidou Center

Every pipe and conduit and strut was exposed; indeed, some may have been added for emphasis.  The architectect seemed determined to make a rather ordinary stairway a central feature of the design and "look" of the place. 

The modernists of the 1930s and 1940s had taken a very different approach.  While valuing the technological, machine aesthetic as much as the postmodernists, their interest in speed and movement led designers to give many of their creations rounded features, and to sheath the products they made in sleek skins of metal and plastic. 

Probably a film projector

In this "streamlined" universe, key ingredients of speed and movement--motors and wheels--were hidden away.  The pencil sharpener and the toaster appeared ready to take off. 

By this definition at least, Rome has come late, and barely, to the postmodern revolution.  Renzo Piano was no help.  Although Rome would be the site of one of his best buildings--the Parco della Musica--it shows not a hint of the architect's place in the postmodern pantheon.  Not a duct in sight. 

We've found two examples of what we'll call Pompidou Postmodernism in Rome: one in architecture, the other in product design. 

The beast unveiled

The product is the motorcycle.  Not all of them, by any means; some--perhaps most--have been designed and presented in the modernist mode, or in some combination.  But some, especially the big, muscular cycles with enormous engines--750 and even 1200cc's--could trace their heritage to that Columbus restaurant.  Their huge and complex engines could be covered with plates of steel, but instead they're exposed, letting us know just what it is we're riding, and what makes it go. 

Exposed girders at MACRO

The building we have in mind is one of our favorites: the MACRO gallery, in the Nomentana quartiere.  It's a lovely combination of sleek, curvilinear modernism and defiant Pomidou Postmodernism.

While the bathrooms are aggressively modern--whether they can actually be used, we can't say (oh, yes we can, says Dianne), but they sure look good--that and other modernist flourishes succeed in part because of the postmodern environment in which they're embedded: the exposed steel girders, with bolts and all, there to remind visitors of the brewery that once operated on the grounds.

Revealing glass elevator, Macro

The elevator, its innards in full view, challenging us to accept technology as the complex phenomenon it is; and a sturdy, unpretentious metal stairway that subtly suggests that our fanciful designs--those sleek skins and surfaces--are products of animals who learned to walk upright. 

Bill

For more pictures of MACRO, see an earlier post.

Postmodern muscle

Modern, streamlined muscle

Original Fake: Store-window takes on Originality

It's getting harder and harder to be "original."  Andy Warhol made that clear in the early 1960s, when he capitulated to capitalism and advertising in the most obvious way, making art that looked very much like a can of Campbell's Soup.  And, to add to the confusion over originality, much of his work was produced by his assistants, not by Warhol himself.  

At about the same time, architects abandoned the quest for the uniquely original aesthetic, retreating to the postmodern preference for mixing and matching historical forms: a bit of the neoclassical here, the pyramids there, and hey, why not a mansard roof?  It was original, but only if the definition includes reassembling the past in a somewhat different way. 

Popular music has always been evolutionary, the province of covers and copies, but especially so after 1970, with the widespread acceptance of "sampling."

That's all background for a couple of photos we took of Italian store windows, each of a shirt with a phrase on it.  One advised, "Don't Copy/Be Original,"  a curious injunction, given that the shirt was obviously mass produced--that is, copied.  The other questioned the idea of originality even more directly: "Original Fake."  

Bill