POST OFFICE ON VIA TARANTO

UFFICIO POSTALE DI VIA TARANTO
Via Taranto 19

1935 Giuseppe Samonà (1898/1983)

The project with which Samonà won the competition in 1933 was modified especially in the back of the building that was compacted, but also in the main façade on Via Taranto

“Giuseppe Samonà was faced with a block to build on quite restricted and irregular, between Via La Spezia, Via Taranto and Via Pozzuoli, and resolved the issue with formal characteristics that respected the original shape of the block itself. In fact, with the façades on Via La Spezia, Via Taranto and Via Pozzuoli the relationship with the surroundings is resolved, breaking only on the corner that opens onto Via Taranto and designing an internal road with a courtyard typical of the old fashioned palaces” (Ghisi Grütter)

“Samonà developed the project with a method of typical functionalist flavor tending to highlight, even in a very compact building, the different internal uses of the building. So the space for the public is characterized by large glass surfaces, the area of the offices by small serial windows, while the body of the stairway is projected out by a frame predominantly vertical” (Piero Ostilio Rossi)

PIAZZA DELLE MUSE APARTMENT HOUSE

PALAZZINA DI PIAZZA DELLE MUSE

Piazza delle Muse 6-7 - Parioli

1940 Ugo Luccichenti (1898/1976)

Original, solar light and architectural solution for a building that is one of the most successful ideas for the civil part of the Italian Rationalism

The balconies are 47 m long (154 feet)

“An interesting example of the compositional maturity reached by Ugo Luccichenti. The main façade doesn't have the materiality of a wall and it turns into a chassis designed by the pillars, on the edge of the façade, and by the edges of the long overhanging balconies. The same design goes beyond the corners and it is repeated on a portion of the side façades, contradicting the uniformity of volume of the building. Large windows close the empty areas of the front, as if to let in the outer landscape within the apartments” (Gianluca Ficorilli - Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani Treccani)

“While in the Furmanik Apartment Block by Mario De Renzi the large balconies are the ones to have the most important formal value, in this project by Luccichenti the cancellation of the 'wall' plays a crucial role. The large windows that, interrupted only by the rhythm of pillars, occupy the entire front of square and round the corners of the side elevations, tend to make intangible part of the built volume and to project into the interior the landscape that goes from Villa Ada to Monte Mario. The large balconies, looking thin for a metal railing (...) lose most of their weight to gain the value of a thin cantilever” (Piero Ostilio Rossi)

LARGO SPINELLI APARTMENT HOUSE

PALAZZINA DI LARGO SPINELLI

Largo Nicola Spinelli 5/Via Giovanni Paisiello

1954 Ugo Luccichenti (1898/1976)

Bold visual and volumetric solutions for this very modern building just a few steps away from Villa Borghese, set in a context of traditional architectures completely contrasting with the particular type of rationalist mannerism that characterizes it

“The volume of the building is divided into base, main body and crown, and each part is transformed by Luccichenti in a pattern of composition. The main body, jutting out over the two floors of the basement, is engraved in the lower level by a loggia continuing on all four sides and bends outward at the front on Via Paisiello. In the roof, the slab jutting out of Largo Spinelli turns the attic into a large loggia digging the volume in its end. The articulated arrangement of the ribbon windows, well designed, gives to the whole building a very peculiar appearance” (Gianluca Ficorilli - Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani Treccani)

“The building is defined by the high quality of its materials (ceramics, wood, glass) and (...) by the ribbon windows modulated almost like a musical score. On one side the wall bends to pick up almost a suggestion from the street, but did not follow it slavishly, managing to maintain its own autonomy, yet being in continuity with the city” (Luca Nicotera - Percorsi romani: Ugo Luccichenti - www.vg-hortus.it)

AIRONE MOVIE THEATER

CINEMA AIRONE

Via Lidia 44 - Via Latina

1953/56 Adalberto Libera (1903/63) for ENPAIA (Ente Nazionale per la Previdenza dei Lavoratori Agricoli e Forestali - National Agency for the Welfare of Agricultural and Forestry Workers)

Spectacular architecture of the great Tyrolean architect among the greatest exponents of Rationalism

"I felt the interior of the hall as the interior of a mandolin, but I was not helped by a mathematical formula, so I went ahead for the best with elliptical sections connected by empirical relationships" (Adalberto Libera)

It was decorated with frescoes by the brilliant abstract artist Giuseppe Capogrossi (1900/72) unfortunately partially destroyed and partially degraded by those who ran the movie theater over the years

The cinema had 800 seats and was constructed about 5 m (16.4 feet) below street level, in a housing complex designed and executed in the same years 1953/56 by Leo Calini (1903/85) and Eugenio Montuori (1907/82)

During the years it was demeaned and brutally reconverted as a disco (Charleston, Stellarium) and as a pub (Makumba) before being left abandoned until 2011, when the Municipality of Rome promoted its restoration and its recovery as a cultural center

One hopes that this gem of the art of Rome may shine again one day

"Adalberto Libera, in developing the project, declined the theme dear to him of the collective room. (...) From the stage frame, with the shape of a television of the 1950s, departed rays of green and white silk accompanying the development of the ceiling and imitating, in the intentions of the architect, the rising of the sun. To embellish the interior of the building, Libera wanted a mural created by Giuseppe Capogrossi, illustrious exponent of Italian abstract art. Spectators, entering the cinema, used to admire the beautiful color flow of the Roman painter stretched in dynamic routes on the ceiling of the large entrance stairway" (Associazione di Promozione Sociale Cineairone - Association of Social Promotion Cineairone - www.cineairone.com)

"The basic idea was to create a unified hall, eliminating the gallery. (...) To build a space functionally and psychologically fit for the purpose, Libera had chosen a shape determined on one hand by the curves of visibility, on the other hand by the desire to define a void that would have its completed form, almost with an absolute value, possibly translated into a mathematical equation. The result (...) was an ovoid with the rear deeply lowered and a considerable expansion at the proscenium. A continuous space extremely enveloping because it has no vertical walls, with the character of an animal cavity, almost the pulsating interior of an organ" (Piero Ostilio Rossi)

BUILDING FOR APARTMENTS ON VIA S. BASILIO

EDIFICIO PER ABITAZIONI IN VIA S. BASILIO

Via S. Basilio 53

1931/32 Adalberto Libera (1903/63)

Also known as CASA NICOLETTI (Nicoletti House)

Restructuring by the great architect from Trentino of a nineteenth-century building for homes, only a stone's throw from Piazza Barberini. It was his first project in Rome 

"Libera is certainly one of the most important figures in the scene of Roman architecture in the thirties and probably, with Mario Ridolfi, the only figure on international level that has operated in Rome in the period between the two wars. (...) He designed the new façade of this building on Via S. Basilio to which he gave a peculiar elegance through the use of moldings in travertine quite projecting and light tubular metal railings painted. Sadly very degraded, the building is today occupied by a small hotel" (Piero Ostilio Rossi)

SINGLE FAMILY HOME ON VIA CARINI

CASA UNIFAMILIARE DI VIA CARINI

Via Giacinto Carini 28 - Porta S. Pancrazio

1926 Gaetano Minnucci (1896/1980)

One of the first residential buildings to be designed according to the indications of the emerging rationalist movement

"Given the date of the project, this building is substantially interesting both for its volumetric composition and for the particular simplicity of its formal solutions. Equally significant is the interior which plays a dominant role in the scale that determines a double-height space, made very bright by the two large windows in the front" (Piero Ostilio Rossi)

"With the book 'The modern popular dwellings in contemporary Holland' (Rome 1926) (...) Minnucci stated the themes of his research on the paradigms of modernity, which he directly applied in the design of the single-family house on Via Carini (...), in which the matrix is distinctly Dutch. This house was one of the few contemporary works that were published in the Manifesto of the Group 7 to be effectively built. (...) The Group 7 (...) dictated new standards for architecture with a series of articles in the journal 'Rassegna Italiana' (Italian Review), that in December 1926 also published the manifesto of Italian Rationalism, which argued the rejection of Eclecticism in favor of the principle of construction in series. This document was prior to the establishment of the Movimento Italiano per l'Architettura Razionale (MIAR) (Italian Movement for Rational Architecture), which included fifty architects divided into regional areas, with Minnucci secretary of the Roman area since the foundation" (Alessandra Capanna - Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani Treccani)

DE' SALVI HOUSE

CASA DE' SALVI

Piazza della Libertà 20

1929/30 Pietro Aschieri (1889/1952)

One of the best examples of rationalist architecture in Rome

"The overlay of decorative elements is replaced by the careful treatment of the walls and the variable projections of the balconies, creating a close dialogue of the elements. The reformulation of some themes in a modern derivation of the Baroque is featured not only in the articulation of the elevations, but also in the insertion of the spiral staircase in the heart of the building block" (Giorgio Muratore)

"In this work too Aschieri shows his interest for the 'wall' and its possible formal characterizations, here resolved through a double set of concave recessions with elliptical cross-section (a theme that he uses in other projects in the same period) that mark vertically the façades and which are even more marked by the continuous bands of the balconies that, in correspondence of the smaller concavity, are projecting outside with a semicircular loggia. It is a theme that directly quotes the articulations of the baroque masses" (Piero Ostilio Rossi)