1928/34 Armando Brasini (1879/1965)
“Brasini
used the languages of the past, the classical and the baroque in particular,
not passively and academically, but, in fact, creatively, considering them not
as closed systems to be applied blindly but as open systems to be investigated
again, asking them questions that had not been raised previously. Also the
Eclecticism of the nineteenth century had been able in many cases to identify
the way of creativity facing new functional themes, new dimensions and new
technology, but in the use of historical languages it had adopted with few
exceptions (Nash, Richardson, Antonelli, Basile) an instrumental attitude.
Brasini came out of the eclectic orthodoxy looking for a continuation of
styles, a search for an all-out development of the architectural language that
would make it suitable for a different climate, a heroic climate, which could
then seem credible and rich of future developments. It should not be forgotten
that we are in the decades of the true and false revolutions that would have to
choose between two types of rhetoric, the one proven by history and one to be
invented, the rhetoric of modernity in action. The outcome was gigantism,
rhetorical excess, theatricality imposed by the nascent film industry, but also
the creation of works blessed by creative restlessness” (Paolo Portoghesi)
INAIL is the Istituto
Nazionale per l'Assicurazione contro gli Infortuni sul Lavoro (National
Institute for Insurance against Accidents at Work)
Built on
the site of the demolished Teatro Drammatico Nazionale (National
Dramatic Theatre) by Francesco Azzurri (1831/1901), on the site of which,
during the construction in 1888, the Hellenistic bronze statues of the “Boxer”
and of the “Hellenistic Prince” had been found
The
two masterpieces are now in the Museo
Nazionale Romano at Palazzo Massimo