Giò Ponti's Rome Apartment Building

Building entryway.  Fluorescent lights at left, opened for replacement.  Note striated ceiling in contrasting whites.  You can
drive cars in here, unload, turn left down the ramp into the garage.  

Ponti's School of Mathematics, U. Rome, side view

To our knowledge, the talented and prolific Italian architect and designer Giò Ponti created only three Rome buildings.  One of them, the building that houses the School of Mathematics (1933-1935) at the University of Rome/La Sapienza, is well known, a luscious example of 1930s modernism and, fortunately, open to the public, in the sense that most university buildings are.  Another is in Prati, near RAI's headquarters.

The other, an apartment building on via Duse (corner of Piazzale delle Muse) in the upscale Parioli neighborhood in the north of the city, is both little known--we can confess now that we didn't know it existed--and, unfortunately, usually inaccessible.  People live and work there, and the building has a portiere.  We were pleased, then, when we saw Ponti's Palazzina Salvatelli (1940) listed for Open House Roma, an annual 2-day event run by the city that encourages the supervised opening of facilities normally closed to the public.

Our genial tour guide was architect Claudio Greco, who twenty years ago had taken on the task--enviable or not--of converting one of the apartments from a residence to a professional office.   Our group of about 15 saw the office he remodeled--tastefully, and with due consideration of the features of Ponti's original design.  More on that, in a moment.

Note 1940-era supports for balcony railing.  

As Greco explained, the exterior of the building was originally covered with off-white mosaic tiles. When they began to fall off in the late 1980s, endangering passers-by, they were removed, leaving the rather ordinary, traditional white facade one sees today.

Portiere's office, at left of entrance

We began our interior journey with the building's entrance--the same today as it was 75 years ago--which consists of two doors: one large sliding door (Ponti was into sliding doors) and, within that large door, a smaller door for individuals.

Ramp to garage

Although the entrance has a human dimension, it was intended for automobile access; the building's tenants could drive their vehicles inside, discharge passengers under cover, and--beyond another sliding door to the left of the fluorescent lights--with a sharp left turn onto an elegant striped ramp, proceed to a parking space below.

Flourescents, lit

The portiere's substantial office--the current portiere proudly made it known he had been in the position 27 years--is on the left as one enters (see above).  A bank of vertical fluorescent lights, which turn out for easy replacement, illuminate the area and reveal the white-on-white pattern of the ceiling, a Ponti feature. A stone bench offers a place for waiting and, to its left, a round--or is it oval?--stairway, serving two apartments per floor, beckons.

Stairway

Front door, from inside.  All original.
Note kickboard. 

Greco's alterations to the apartment were significant.  The kitchen, for example, became an office working area with a pass-through feature, and the front hallway became a waiting room for clients--nicely accomplished in Ponti style.  A new wall, one end of which intersects rather awkwardly with a Ponti arch, was constructed so that employees could pass from one office to another without intersecting with those in the waiting room.

Remodeled hallway

A hallway, while significantly redone in the changeover, retains the look and feel of Ponti's work.

Nice door handle

The interventions were tastefully accomplished, and many of Ponti's signature details remain: the wooden doors frames--set about half an inch from the adjacent walls--the elegant brass handles, the partial kick-plates at floor level, simple, dignified, glass paneled doors, the parquet floors (30 x 30 cm), a sliding door with horizontal stripes in wood and white paint.  The ceiling in what was once the living room is notable too, with a center inset of white stripes of different depths.

Office painting combines de Chirico with Picasso's "Guernica."
Note sliding, striped door at right.  Our guide--the guy who
remodeled the apartment in 1995--is at center.  

The current occupants have taken to decorating their offices with paintings that resemble and take off from those of Roman artist Giorgio de Chirico, certainly the most famous exponent of metaphysical painting (a style that most art history sources describe as existing for about a decade after 1910).  We wish they hadn't. The reference lacks the sublety of Ponti's vision, and it competes--and not well--with Ponti's design.






But it may have been irresistible.  An early photograph of Palazzina Salvatelli, below, presents the building as mysterious, even haunting, possessing a significance somehow beyond its parts, even beyond its whole. The building as essence. In a word, metaphysical.

Bill

  

The Parking Garage beneath the Villa Borghese

It was a lovely afternoon on via Veneto, and so we naturally decided to explore--hope you're ready for this--an underground parking garage!  (Chorus of moans, sighs of despair from readers. Tearing of hair.)

In our defense, we think this is only the second parking garage we've featured.  The other is Riccardo Morandi's groovy (as in late 1950s) structure, linked to a large indoor market on via Magnagrecia.  Not everyone--not even some well known Rome architects--knows about that building. 

Adventure begins

The garage we explore in this post is located on (or under) viale del Galoppatoio, beneath the Villa Borghese.  It can be accessed off the fast-moving viale del Muro Torto.  Indeed, there's a YouTube video of a driver coming up the Muro Torto, turning onto the garage access ramp, going through the garage, and exiting--well, somewhere.  It's less than two minutes long:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJHuorfImZU. 


We took the pedestrian escalator entrance at the high end of via

Veneto.  Once below ground level, to get to the garage proper one walks through a long tunnel that is sometimes peopleless. 












At the end of the tunnel there's a depressing commercial area (not fully occupied, not enough

Too much concrete.  But then it's a parking garage.

"traffic").  Beyond that there's some brutalist concrete work (right) and--the first sign, really, of the architectural genius we're looking for--a circular staircase that leads upward to the park (below). 











It's a bit worn now, but still impressive.  Maybe the architect knew of Morandi's circular design (of

You could date the structure within 10 years just from
this stairway

course he did).  It's not Borromini's staircase in the Palazzo Barberini.  It's not Albini and Helg's department store gem in Piazza Fiume.  But it is suggestive. 

Watergate apartments, Washington, D.C.

It ought to be.  For the architect who designed the stairway, and the famous garage beneath, is one of Rome's most famous and most talented.  Readers of Rome the Second Time will know him as the author of the recently restored ex-GIL in Trastevere, but he is also revered for the Casa della Cooperative Astra (1947-51) on via Jenner, and for a building known as La Girasole (1949-50), on via Bruno Buozzi, at no. 64.  He had a hand, too, in the 1960 Olympic Village in the Flaminio district.  Most Americans will be familiar with his Washington, D.C. creation: the Watergate complex. 

Under construction.  It's better without cars. 

The garage is by Luigi Moretti.  It houses 1800 spaces for automobiles, 210 for scooters and motorcycles.  It was completed between 1965 and 1972, which accounts for the hybrid look of late modernism and early brutalism (the concrete noted earlier). Whatever its appeal, it was sufficient to lure a major international modern art exhibit--known as Contemporanea--which inhabited the structure in 1973, a moment when such an idea could not only be imagined, but brought to fruition.  The garage's architectural reputation would seem to rest (like the garage itself) on its graceful, space-age columns, and on its concave roof treatments, with a nod to the occasional provision for natural light.  

Contemporanea, 1973, an area featuring Kounellis

Now, isn't that more fun that having a cocktail at the Grand Hotel Palace?

Bill

p.s. A controversial plan, involving some actual digging, to add some 700 area parking places in a nearby lot under the Pincio, the small hill above Piazza del Popolo--said to be necessary to convert the trident area off the piazza to pedestrian-only traffic--now seems dead. 


 

Light from above enters the space.  Even some foliage. 

Born Again in Piazza Fiume: La Rinascente

Piazza Fiume.  As Rome piazzas go, it's not much.  Today, its main purpose is to move vehicles from one place to another: the North/South, one-way thoroughfare via Salaria drains the Trieste quartiere, dumping tens of thousands of cars and scooters daily into the piazza and onto Corso Italia, where they hurtle down the Muro Torto to Piazza del Popolo, or take a mysterious left turn, cutting back through a section of the Aurelian city wall, to access the Corso going east.  Except for a small section of the piazza on the northwest, where the intersection with via Bergamo creates a bit of civil space, Piazza Fiume is a mess. 

That doesn't mean there aren't some things to see.  Gather your pedestrian skills and cross Corso Italia with the traffic coming down via Salaria.  There, on the southwest corner, you'll find a bland 1950s building, now occupied by Barclay's Bank.  Bland, yes, but over the entrance to the left, now looking north, are a curious set of painted protusions affixed to the wall.  Like a fifties album cover.  Cool, man!

Across via Piave (the extension of via Salaria) is one of Rome's few neo-Gothic structures, with those pointed windows that seem so out of place in this mostly neo-classical city. 

And on that building--appropriately on via Piave--note the large plaque honoring the Italian soldiers who fought and died in a dramatic and successful effort to hold off an advancing Austro-Hungarian force at the Piave River in northeast Italy during World War I. 









Walk up the street, toward the piazza (beware motorists turning left!) and enjoy the interesting section of the wall and a bunch of columns in front of it (we have no explanation for this craziness, except it's eclectic Rome at its best).

Across the street, an underground bookstore boasts a section of Roman wall, jutting out into the room, and black and white photos of the city here and there. 

So there's more to Piazza Fiume than meets the eye, especially for Rome-the-Second-Time bottom feeders.  But we've saved the best for last. On the northwest corner of the piazza is a department store, La Rinascente (roughly translated "rebirth").  Against all odds and, it would seem at first glance, common sense, it's a registered and protected architectural landmark.  It was designed by the Milanese team of Franco Albini and Franca Helg--their only building in Rome--and constructed between 1959 and 1961, when it opened.  Albini was an architect of considerable reputation, his career going back to the 1930s, when he designed public housing.  

It was the second La Rinascente store in Rome (the first, opened in 1887, was until recently at the corner of via del Corso and via del Tritone--the building still exists), and Albini and Helg used the basic massing of that first store in their design for this one.  Beyond that, the modern store, for all its apparent ordinariness, was new, fresh and innovative, inside and out.  The structure is of reinforced concrete and steel frame.  The exterior infill panels--an outstanding feature--are of masonry, not flat but folded--Baroque "movement" in the facade design, some say--and tinted to recall the color of porcelain in ancient Rome.  One observer has described it as a "Renaissance facade redone with contemporary technology." 

Another important feature is the substantial, open, steel cornice, referencing Michelangelo's cornice--surely the most famous in the city--for the Palazzo Farnese. 

The Sorgente Group, which has owned the building since 2006, claims that La Rinascente "is considered the best example of the setting of a modern building within the historical context of the city."  Architectural critic Reyner Banham, likely to be less biased, nonetheless shares the Sorgente Group's admiration, while noting the limitations imposed by the era.  Albini, he notes, faced severe "cultural restraints."  "He was designing a building for a conspicuous site in the history-laden ambiente of Rome, at a time when the historical nerve of most Italian architects had failed almost completely (these were the years of Neoliberty nostalgia)."

Inside, you'll find a modern department store, recently refurbished.  Shop 'til you drop. And as you do, consider three elements of the interior.  On the top floor there's a modern bar/cafe.  Avoid it or embrace it as you choose, but don't miss a chance to look out the windows, where you'll have an extreme close-up view of the steel cornice. 

Descending on the escalators, you should know that these were installed in 2011 by the firm of Tim Power Architects, perhaps replacing an elevator.  The Tim Power firm makes much of this makeover, emphasizing the importance of redoing the building's circulation so that customers could reach the upper floors rapidly and without waiting.  (The Power folks even cite starchitect Rem Koolhaas, for whom escalators are a "key metaphor for the expanding city.")  

The Albini/Helg staircase

We hope we haven't lost you here, because there's one more gem in this building.  The chiocciola--the word means both "snail" and "spiral staircase"--which once provided much or all of the building's circulation, is a masterpiece, an "expressive shell" that draws architectural historians to the building.  You'll have to poke around to find this wonder in Veronese red marble.  Each rung of the metal railing has a small curve at the end, marking the era. 

It may well be the most sensational staircase in Rome, though modernists will claim that honor for Luigi Moretti's chiocciola in the ex-GIL (a Fascist-era youth center) at the intersection of viale di Trastevere and via G. Induno. 

The Borromini/Maderno staircase

The Albini/Helg staircase is most often compared to the 1627 marvel by Francesco Borromini and Carlo Maderno, in Palazzo Barberini.  A photographer who admires both claims that the "api" (bees) that were a required element in anything created for the Barberini family, also appear in the staircase at La Rinascente.  Check that out. 

Bill

The Spiral Stairways of Rome

We've assembled five of our favorite spiral stairways.  Four are in Rome.  On the upper left, Bill is rather awkwardly examining an exhibit mounted in the helicoidal (apparently that's a word) ramp at the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca, located just steps from the Trevi Fountain.  The palazzo dates to the 16th century, and in the 17th, Francesco Borromini worked his magic and constructed this ramp, which circles inside the building for several stories.  Its purpose remains obscure; we don't know if it was intended for foot traffic, or horses.  On the upper right, a cool, modernist stairway designed by Luigi Moretti.  It's housed in the back of the Casa del GIL (a Fascist youth center), located within about 200 meters of Porta Portese in Trastevere (just follow the streetcar tracks), which was built between 1933 and 1936.  The staircase is accessible from the side of the building, off the parking lot. 

Below left, that smiling woman is Dianne, standing beneath a lovely staircase in one of the new towns--we're pretty sure it's Latina, but it could be Pontinia--built by the Mussolini government in the 1930s on the reclaimed Pontine marshes.  Below right, courtesy of photographer Jessica Stewart (see her site, http://www.romephotoblog.com/), is one of two water towers constructed during the modernization of the Termini Station.  This one is located at the back of the station, on the right side (as one faces the station).  The architect was Angiolo Mazzoni, who also designed the towering side aisles of Termini.

Finally, a tantalizing staircase from the Villa Medici.  Looking up.    Bill