The View From Rome

Last month afforded me three opportunities to indulge in some personal nostalgia by revisiting Post Modernism, the loosely defined movement of about three decades ago that broke with the International Style and embraced references to historical architecture, decoration and popular culture.

The first opportunity was a conference at the University of Notre Dame, “Seaside at 30,” which re-assembled the team that made the first New Urbanist community and started a movement to change the way we plan cities. There is no question that New Urbanism is one of the principal legacies of the Post-Modern critique of Modernism and, I suspect, the one that will have the greatest impact on the future of our built environment. Two highlights from the conference for me were the admission by the formerly notoriously pessimistic Leon Krier that Seaside proved that “it is, indeed, possible” to build once again.

The other was the suggestion by Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk that Seaside is now old enough to be designated a historic district in some jurisdictions and what would that mean? That question sparked a series of comments that brought together the so far little-explored common ground between historic preservation and New Urbanism. Andrés Duany’s talk about “successional urbanism” showed that the experience of planning New Urbanist towns is now feeding back into our ability to understand historical cities, including Rome. All of this is great material for further chewing over.

The Portland Building, by Michael Graves, 1982.

The second opportunity was another con ference, “Postmodernism Reconsidered,” sponsored by the Institute of Classical Architecture and Art in New York (and co-sponsored by the University of Notre Dame and the University of Miami schools of architecture), which assembled an international cast of original Post Modernists and several younger commentators. “I feel like I am attending my own wake,” declared Robert A. M. Stern, as he introduced Tom Wolfe, who spoke about his seminal From Bauhaus to Our House.

While speakers including Richard John, Jaquelin Robertson and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk acknowledged the importance of recovering the Classical language – what Robertson called “the lingua franca of Western architecture” – other participants, including Denise Scott Brown (in a video) and Judy Di Maio (live) insisted that “you can’t imitate history.” Di Maio said that she loved living and teaching in Rome for many years but wouldn’t know how to design an Ionic capital and didn’t want to learn. I said to her, “Too bad. You should try it. It’s one of life’s greatest pleasures!” What’s more, the Classical language is the key to understanding Rome, the city that she and so many of the conference speakers professed to love.

It seemed not to occur to anyone that the very existence of the three sponsoring organizations –  themselves step-children of Post Modernism – was evidence that you can, in fact, recover historic traditions and that doing so is the only effective alternative to the bleak Modernist world that PoMo tried to escape.

The Sony Tower, formerly the AT&T Building, New York, by Johnson/Burgee Architects, 1978-83.

The third opportunity was the exhibition, “Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990” at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The title pretty much sums up the exhibition, which features not only architecture, but also decorative arts, fashion, pop music and film, wrapping them up in an entertaining but ultimately formless nostalgia trip. There was lots of “style,” but it was never clear what was being “subverted.”

Much was made of Venturi and Scott Brown’s studies of symbolism and rhetoric in the strip culture of Las Vegas, but the only indication that this model of inhabiting the landscape is now in crisis was the evocative fast-forward view of headlights and tail lights on a Los Angeles freeway in a clip from Godfrey Reggio’s film “Koyaanisqatsi.”

A model of Piazza d’Italia in New Orleans by Charles Moore, photos of the conversion of a former supermarket into a courthouse by Alan Greenberg and a full-scale reproduction of Hans Hollein’s façade for the Strada Novissima at the 1980 Venice Biennale were virtually the only references to architectural classicism. The emergence of New Urbanism was perhaps implicit in a poignant juxtaposition of two plates from the 1978 Roma Interrotta exhibition: that of Venturi and Scott Brown, confronting Classical Rome with Ceasar’s Forum on The Strip, and that of Leon Krier, projecting a sense of loss in the face of the culture represented by classical Rome. These panels represented the parents, if you will, of New Urbanism, the offspring, respectively, of an impulse to communicate with popular culture and an attempt to recover lost building traditions.

At the same time, those two images perfectly capture the Post-Modernist dilemma: how to pursue an alternative to the Modern Movement without submitting to the discipline necessary to recover a traditional architectural culture or generate a lasting formal language? Instead, the Post-Modern culture celebrated by the exhibition struck a “profoundly superficial” pose, playing with ironic references to the entire history of culture high and low and stubbornly refusing the demands of creating actual content. But you can’t build a city out of images and stylized gestures. The real achievement of Post Modernism was to give birth to those who pursued the more difficult and less fashionable course of reconstructing a culture in which cities and dignified buildings might be built once again. Hence, Krier’s comment at the Notre Dame conference.

If the Post-Modern architects were not good urbanists, they often succeeded at the scale of a teapot. Perhaps Aldo Rossi’s single best design is his coffee and tea service for Alessi, contained within a glass and silver vitrine in the form of a little pedimented temple. This very attractive design suggests that many of the architectural icons of the period would have been far more successful had they, like Rossi’s piece, been about 24 inches tall.

Johnson/Burgee’s AT&T Building and Michael Graves’s Portland Building would both have been more convincing as furniture than they proved at full scale. A fundamental principle of scale requires that a building hundreds of feet tall must articulate itself into a series of nested parts or scale levels. Without this compositional subdivision (which we can see in almost any building designed before the Modern Movement swept away such traditional notions), a building like those just mentioned looks like nothing more than a chest of drawers or tea service blown up to monstrous size. You can’t build a city out of buildings like these either.

What the curators at the V&A don’t say is that the only alternative to vacuousness lies in the reconstruction of the traditional city and the recovery of architectural language. These goals are being pursued with considerable success now by many of the people represented by the three sponsors of the New York conference and by many of the designers building at Seaside, even if the arts establishment and the mainstream architectural press continue to ignore them. That success was made possible, in part, by the opening toward history and popular culture brought about by the Post-Modern critique, but fulfillment of those goals requires the acquisition of tools that Post Modernism itself could not supply.

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I first became aware of Armando Brasini as an undergraduate architecture student in the 1970s when I read Robert Venturi’s, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (Museum of Modern Art, 1965). It was the same book in which I first read the name Lutyens. A few buildings by both of them appeared in the thumbnail-sized photographs of the first edition. What initially attracted my attention was, first, that both of these 20th-century architects continued to design buildings in the classical manner – indeed were clearly masters of it – and, second, that both names had been utterly absent from my architectural education.

Who were these two mysterious but obviously accomplished architects whose buildings were so at odds with the “architecture of our time”? And why had they been banished from the history of modern architecture and never mentioned by any of my professors?

Since then, Lutyens has received the attention he deserves, but, to this day, there is almost nothing about Brasini in print in English and very little in Italian. The reputations of Brasini and others in Italy who continued to design buildings in the classical tradition after 1920 were not just forgotten but erased, like those Soviet politicians during the Stalinist period whose faces simply disappeared from retouched official photographs.

Main Gate, Zoological Park of Rome, by Armando Brasini, 1910. An early work by the architect showing a characteristic fusion of architecture and sculpture, as well as a naturally inventive handling of the classical language.

Today we can understand why Brasini’s work had to “disappear.” He could not be dismissed as a producer of pastiche or kitsch or someone who stubbornly tried to flog an exhausted style. His designs were full-bodied, passionate, grand, innovative, imaginative and full of life. They were not academic or antiquarian but were often “over the top.” In other words, they were Roman.

Hence, Brasini had to be erased in order to propagate the myth that the Modern Movement had supplanted a classical tradition that was exhausted and irrelevant. As a consequence, not only is Brasini’s work absent from the standard histories or guidebooks, but his buildings have suffered neglect, misuse and even demolition.

Like the American Stanford White, Brasini was one of those astonishingly talented people from modest backgrounds who seem to emerge as fully formed artists in their youth, without any formal education in architecture. Brasini’s began his career as a painter, decorative plasterer, stone carver and sculptor, but by his late teens he was designing ornament for the Vittorio Emmanuele II monument in Rome, then still under construction.

Later he would be named “artistic director” of the monument and would oversee its final completion in the 1930s. While his buildings are superbly built and detailed, they are also fantastic and visually striking. A youthful example is his entrance gate for the Rome zoo, where sculpted elephants’ heads act as keystones, their trunks probing the archivolts.

INAIL Building, Rome, by Armando Brasini, 1928-1931. This complex building is remarkably sensitive to a very challenging urban context. It is also beautifully composed and detailed. Like all good classical buildings, it manages to work on several different scales at once, offering something new at each scale level, from the urban to the decorative detail.

While Brasini’s talent lay in manipulating the classical language at the scale of the individual building and its decorative detail, his buildings are exceptionally sensitive to urban context, as at the INAIL building at the head of Via IV Maggio, a work of which Lutyens himself would have been proud. Each of this curious building’s two volumes addresses one of two distinct scales. The tall and strongly modeled brick mass, with its surprising two arched bays and detailing reminiscent of Michelangelo, addresses the distant view from the Piazza Venezia; the shorter, more massive stone volume responds to the closer view up the avenue leading to its main entrance, with its axis slightly shifted from that of the upper volume to recognize the center line of the street. The entrance is framed by Doric columns projecting from its concave, rusticated façade in Roman travertine, while above the brick and stone articulation plays a more lighthearted compositional game.

There is an undeniable lack of unity between the parts, and the work as a whole produces the kind of “complexity and contradiction” that attracted the eye of Venturi. Still, none of the building’s eccentricities is indulgent or willful; rather, the building is an exemplary exercise in urban scenography fitted into its extremely constricted and topographically challenging site.

Complex of the Buon Pastore, Rome, by Armando Brasini, 1929-34. An extraordinary large-scale work whose meticulously symmetrical plan is belied by its varied and highly sculptural massing. Geometrical and visual and perspective relationships are closely coordinated throughout. The courtyard and chapel dome are outstanding features revealing the architect’s vivid spatial and structural imagination.

The Convent of the Buon Pastore was originally a religious institution, designed in 1929 and completed in 1943, later converted into a hospital and currently housing two high schools. It is now undergoing a long overdue restoration. Surrounded by countryside when it was completed, the complex retains the appearance of being a little walled town. The exterior is rather castle like and defensive, but the central chapel – with a tall dome that would have delighted Borromini – faces an Escher-like courtyard surrounded by extraordinary arcades. The whole composition is as disciplined and orderly as any Beaux-Arts exercise, and yet the overall impression is dream-like and totally unexpected.

Church of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Rome, by Armando Brasini, 1923-38, resumed 1950-51. Still lacking the tall dome Brasini intended, the church nonetheless impresses with its intensely dramatic lower portion, which seems driven by centrifugal forces. The composition is a masterful overlay of circular and orthogonal geometries, and the interior space is strongly suggestive of the great ancient Roman baths.

The Church of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in the Parioli neighborhood (its design began in 1923 with construction continuing into the 1950s) remains incomplete, lacking the tall dome that would justify the massiveness of the constructed lower part. The plan is geometrically disciplined – a Greek Cross inscribed in a circle – and the interior is spacious and clear but with unexpected perspectives in the interstices between the orthogonal and circular geometries.

The exterior suggests a Roman ruin – the great buttresses holding up the Coliseum come to mind – or perhaps a Baroque church undergoing a slow-motion explosion, pressing and bending its classical columns and pediments outward with tremendous force. Brasini’s dome would have held all this drama together. He had already designed a dome for the 17th-century Baroque masterpiece, the church of Sant’Ignazio, which likewise never received its originally intended culminating feature. We can gain a sense of what the Parioli church might have been like by looking at Brasini’s model for the Sant’Ignazio dome displayed inside the church.

While post-war critics wrote Brasini out of the history books and denounced classicism as the style of fascism, the true story is more complex. First, neither classical nor modernist styles were given official sanction by Mussolini; the closest thing to an official fascist style was an attempted synthesis of traditional and modern design that was not unique to Italy but was also visible in France and the U.S. at the time. The only style officially banned by the regime was the classical, and Brasini, its foremost exponent, received no state commissions after 1932. His Forestry and Agriculture pavilion at the ill-fated proposed world’s fair at EUR south of Rome was the project’s only fully classical design and the only one of the original buildings to be demolished after the war.

Brasini’s taste was surely “over the top,” and his urban proposals betray the over-scaled megalomania that seems typical of the period between 1913 and 1929 – and certainly not exclusively fascist in either origin or implication, as we can see in the equally grandiose imagery of contemporaries like Hugh Ferris or Le Corbusier. But he was an imaginative genius whose sensibility – uniting geometrically disciplined formal order with a fantastic and dramatic picturesqueness – bridges the Baroque and the modern. Finally, he is beginning to receive new and sympathetic interest from a new generation of Italian historians and critics.

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Readers of this blog are familiar with the debate about current preservation policies that privilege contrasting Modernist additions and infill construction in historic settings. New attention is being paid to the contradictions inherent in a design philosophy based on the concept of “differentiation.” A dissenting viewpoint is ruffling the preservation establishment, as evidenced by the symposium in Washington, DC, earlier this summer sponsored by US/ICOMOS. Clem Labine and I, together with several other speakers, made the case that the current ICOMOS Charters and the Secretary’s Standards should be modified to remove the implication that contrasting new construction is good and conforming new traditional construction is bad. While the National Park Service correctly points out that this is not what the Standards actually say, this interpretation has become so widespread in the field that a change in language is perhaps the only way to break architects and preservation authorities out of their bad mental habits.

I prefaced my suggestions for new language for Standards 3 and 9 with these propositions.

• Preservation policies should protect the cultural significance of our built heritage sites. “Cultural significance” must include both the historical (in the sense of documenting that “this or that happened”) and the cultural or artistic (such as knowing why we want to preserve this and how doing so reflects our aspirations as well as our memories).
• Judgments about the treatment of cultural heritage should be interdisciplinary, reflecting diverse views, including – of course – practitioners of traditional architecture who see heritage sites not only as “documents of their times,” but also as models for contemporary practice.
• Preservation policies must apply to all sites, regardless of style or historical period. Today, we see extraordinary deference being paid to works by Modernist designers, while the works of their contemporaries who continue to design in traditional manners have suffered from “oppositional” interventions. We should have one rule, regardless of style.
• We must eliminate stylistic bias from all our regulatory documents. If the new work should reflect “contemporary design,” and the “architecture of our time” includes both Frank Gehry and Quinlan Terry, any attempt to define the “contemporary” in terms of only one of those approaches is simply aesthetic prejudice.
• Preservation authorities should promote “appropriateness.” I have proposed that the appropriate is the fitting and the exemplary. A new building or an addition is fitting when it intends to fit, rather than subvert, the character of the place and responds to local climate, materials, topography and building traditions. It is exemplary when it “sets a good example” for others to follow so that, over time, the character of the place will be preserved rather than diminished.
• “Differentiating” new work from historic fabric is valid. But it should be subtle. This approach dates back to such 19th-century models as the Arch of Titus in the Roman Forum, where restorers recomposed the surviving fragments of the Roman marble arch and completed the missing parts in similarly colored, but distinguishable, travertine. But the useful distinction between new and old materials must not prevent our seeing the monument as a whole. Similarly, managing a historic district, like curating an art collection, cannot succeed if you are only permitted to add to it things that do not belong there.
• Conservation must consider not just physical artifacts, but also the building cultures that produced our heritage sites in the first place. The best way to sustain a historic place is to add new features using the same design concepts, styles, materials and craftsmanship that produced it historically. Without such a commitment to the survival of building cultures, what hope is there for physical preservation in the long term?
• No preservation policy should be enacted under which the resources it aims to protect could not have been legally produced. Except in that minority of places where extraordinary significance demands no further change, our aim should be to re-establish traditions, craftsmanship and rituals of care that can sustain the protected environment in the future without unnecessary loss. A preservation regulation that outlaws the process by which the site became what it is, or that would prevent it from continuing to evolve on the same lines, is self-contradictory.

In light of these propositions, I offered modified language for two of the Secretary’s Standards. My suggested revision of Standard 3:

Each property shall be recognized as a physical record of its time, place, use and building culture. Interventions shall not obscure perception of the historical development of the site, and interpretative materials shall be available to assist the public in understanding the site’s changing character and significance over time.

This eliminates the confusing language about avoiding “a false sense of historical development,” which has been used as a justification for declining proposed new traditional design.

And my suggested revision to Standard 9:

New additions, exterior alterations or new construction shall be sympathetic to historic materials, features and spatial relationships that characterize the property. The new work may be in any appropriate architectural style but must be:

• deferential toward the historic fabric in terms of massing, scale, materials and architectural features to protect the cultural significance of the site;
• identifiable as such so that, aided by suitable interpretative materials, the historic resource may be distinguished from new construction; and
• harmonious, avoiding unnecessary contrast with the historic fabric in form or material, to maintain the integrity and character of the site and its context.

The term “deferential” was suggested by John Sandor in the Traditional Building Roundtable last October and denotes an attitude of respect, as when we show deference to persons older and wiser than ourselves by not competing with them for attention. Architecturally, deference means the historic resource retains pride of place, whatever the style or character of the new construction.

“Identifiable as such” comes from the Burra Charter and emphasizes recognition by an informed observer of the facts of a site’s development based on knowledge of the style, materials and methods used, rather than relying on material and stylistic contrast that might erode the very character the preservation activity intends to protect.

Finally, “harmonious” connotes a conscious sympathy among the parts of what is intended as a larger composition to which the historical and the new features jointly contribute. This language recalls the “tout ensemble” so effectively preached in New Orleans, which was among the first cities in the U.S. to introduce the urban scale as a decisive factor in preservation decisions. While there may be instances where a visual rupture between the new and the old might be called for, or where the character of a district is so diverse that any attempt to harmonize with it is effectively doomed, such instances are rare. Instead, harmony, continuity and wholeness should be the presumed aim when the architect intervenes in a valued pre-existing historic context.

The suggestions were received with interest, and it appears that some change in the official guidance is now a topic of discussion within the halls of the establishment. Stay tuned.

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Last month, I participated in a number of events in the United States that represent a rising tide of discussion about preservation and urban conservation issues. I discussed the workshop at the American Institute of Architects convention in my last post; this time, my focus is on the annual meeting of the Congress for the New Urbanism in Madison, WI (CNU 19), where the convergent goals and emerging collaborative practices of New Urbanism and historic preservation were the subject of a session I organized and chaired called “The City of Contrasts vs. the City of Continuity: New Urbanism and Historic Preservation.”

In my introductory remarks, I recalled that more than 50 years ago, Henry Hope Reed published his seminal book, The Golden City. The first chapter, entitled “The City of Contrasts,” showed side-by-side images of traditional and Modernist architecture and urban spaces in New York, drawing the obvious conclusion: The modern works represented an intentional contrast with, if not a deliberate attempt to destroy, the visual qualities of the classical city. That contrast has been a signature feature of the Modern Movement and its contemporary descendants, from Le Corbusier’s 1925 Plan Voisin for Paris, to projects proposed in historic settings around the world today. The movement sought the replacement of the traditional city of a defined public realm of streets and squares with the Modernist vision of object buildings in an indefinite landscape threaded by highways. Preservation was grudgingly accepted but limited to a handful of isolated monuments, like the Louvre and Notre Dame, in Le Corbusier’s plan.

Today things have changed. The emergence of New Urbanism and the recovery of traditional architecture in contemporary practice give us an alternative to the City of Contrasts: the City of Continuity. The session at CNU 19 started from this premise and explored how historic preservation and urban design might work together to bring this potential City of Continuity into reality.

I began by pointing out the objectives and tools that preservation and New Urbanism have in common: Both fields have as their “territory” the existing urban environment, and both seek to protect the valued cultural significance embodied in it. Many practices and methods now associated with New Urbanism (such as field surveys, pattern books, form-based codes and other similar documentary and regulatory tools) derive from preservation experience. Whereas those nominating a historic district to the National Register need to document the area’s urban and architectural “genetic code” – the “character-defining elements” that make the district a proper subject for preservation – New Urbanists study historic neighborhoods in order to learn how to extract that DNA and re-animate it to produce new neighborhoods with similar character, vitality, scale, mixed uses and “walkability.” For this reason, we might call New Urbanist form-based codes a kind of preservation in reverse.

With respect to their appreciation of the past, these two fields are natural allies, but, when it comes to the future – what kinds of new architecture is appropriate in historic districts, for example – they have rather different ideas. While New Urbanists tend to look upon historic neighborhoods as models to be critically examined for the design of new ones, preservationists (many of them, especially in the professional ranks) tend to look upon historic sites as “documents of their times” and draw a firm line between protecting historic fabric and allowing new construction in historic settings in similar styles. New work, it is thought, should document its time – our time – in the same way that a historic structure is believed to do.

Therefore, while New Urbanists often seek to promote continuity with local building traditions, preservation is officially committed to admitting only new elements that are “differentiated” from the historic structures – as called for in the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Rehabilitation – a policy that, in its more uncompromising forms, has resulted in dissonant new designs in historic districts that de-contextualize the historic resources in their midst.

How do we resolve this division between these two fields? In part, I suggested, the division will be healed by New Urbanists and preservationists working more closely together at the grass-roots level, where common-sense attitudes toward new architecture are more evident. We can also reach out to those individual in the leadership of the preservation movement who are open to the possibilities of new traditional architecture and urbanism in historic places. The session itself was an opportunity – to my knowledge the first ever – for New Urbanists and preservationists to start a conversation that everyone who thinks about the issues for a moment agrees needs to happen.

Figure 1. The Jewish Museum, New York, NY: The former Felix Warburg mansion has been the home of the Jewish Museum since the 1940s. In the 1990s, the museum decided against a modernist building and opted to “grow” the existing structure, even though many preservationists oppose this strategy for adding to traditional buildings. Kevin Roche designed a two-bay addition that uses the same materials and details as the existing, beautifully executed by Cathedral Stoneworks in limestone.

At the session, John Massengale, architect and a long-time pillar of the New Urbanism movement, presented a critique of “orthodox” preservation policy’s misplaced emphasis on “differentiation.” Using examples from New York, John argued that architectural continuity – even replication, at times – was sound preservation and sound urbanism. (See Figure 1.)

Vince Michael, preservationist, educator and member of the board of the National Trust for Historic Preservation (NTHP), concurred that the Secretary’s Standards need to be reconsidered. Using examples drawn from the Midwest, he showed how current practice in the field is varied and inconsistent, ranging from misguided attempts at “differentiation” that erode historic character to more discerning judgments that yield more historically sensitive additions and infill construction.

Ann Daigle, program manager for the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment (PFBE) “Rebuilding Communities” Craftsman Apprenticeship Programme, gave a moving presentation on the efforts of the PFBE, the Preservation Resource Center, the NTHP, Habitat for Humanity and other organizations in New Orleans engaged in rebuilding historic neighborhoods stricken by the disaster of Hurricane Katrina. From among the city’s historic districts, Ann illustrated both restored and rebuilt traditional houses, as well as new houses based on historic types and styles. In most cases, the new designs aspire to architectural continuity, though quality is still uneven.

Most important, the PFBE’s restoration program trains apprentices in the building trades and crafts that will allow them to continue their recovery efforts and, in turn, train the next generation of restoration craftspeople. New Orleans has emerged as an important laboratory for testing synergies between New Urbanist thinking and preservation know-how.

Figure 2. City Place, West Palm Beach, Florida: The master plan by Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co. established form-based codes to promote mixed use and “walkability” throughout the city. The urban design code allowed for development rights transfers, offering preservation incentives to owners of historic buildings that existing preservation ordinances did not. Here, an historic church (left) encloses a new piazza across from new commercial development (right).

Finally, Anthea Giannotes spoke about her experience in West Palm Beach, FL, where the master plan for the city – including some 16 locally designated historic districts – made use of tools like form-based codes and development rights transfers to achieve protection of historic structures that were under protected by the existing preservation ordinances. Preservationists and New Urbanists worked together to achieve a degree of integration between historic and new resources that neither discipline could have achieved working alone. This “toolbox” can readily serve as a model for other places. (See Figure 2.)

The session demonstrated – and the enthusiastic audience response afterward confirmed – that there are vast opportunities for greater mutual awareness and professional collaboration between the two fields. Rather than each remaining fixed on a particular, narrowly defined set of goals, the New Urbanists and preservationists should be natural allies in creating and practicing a conservation ethic designed to heal the wounds caused by nearly a century of the City of Contrasts and bring into being the City of Continuity.

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Part I: New Orleans

My just-ended whirlwind speaking tour in the U.S. began with the American Institute of Architects convention in New Orleans, May 11-13. I had not been in that marvelous city since the devastation that followed Hurricane Katrina five years ago, and I was eager to see the rebuilding efforts firsthand. But first, I have to note the AIA meeting itself, for which the theme was “Revolution!” Just what revolution these aging Baby Boomer architects had in mind was not clear, but the stark black type and symbolic clenched fist brought back memories of the early 1970s that I had thought were long gone.

It turns out the revolution the architects had in mind is a “green revolution,” and we were informed that the management of groundwater runoff would revolutionize the way buildings look forever. Yes, groundwater runoff. Now, in a city that was under 20 feet of water in some places, that’s probably a reasonable concern, but how that factor alone would require a completely new kind of architecture was not explained. Nor was how we will be able to use photovoltaic cells, metallic-mesh sun screens and other high-tech “gadget green” cliches after the petroleum runs out.

Now imagine this. Thousands of architects talking earnestly about “sustainability” in a windowless, hulking building nearly a mile long, resembling a grim and endless airport concourse, where the interior temperature is a bone-chilling 60 degrees, thanks to a hyperactive air conditioning system. Outside, it’s a sunny 89 degrees with a delightful breeze. Want to make gains in sustainability? Forget turbines on the roof; just turn off the air conditioning and open the windows!

I participated in a day-long workshop on May 11 organized by Tom McGrath of the National Park Service, one that examined the range of efforts to rebuild the city’s housing. A broad spectrum of speakers presented a range of rebuilding efforts, especially for lower-income populations. Leading off the program was Andres Duany, who did something unheard of: He admitted he had been wrong. In his talk, he declared that “we were wrong about that and it was our fault.” He was talking about decisions made early in the New Urbanist charrette team’s efforts to pursue industrialized methods to produce thousands of housing units quickly.

The large numbers of Katrina Cottages never materialized, and most of the thousands of new housing units built in the city, regardless of style, have been made the old-fashioned way: on site, by hand, stick framed, one at a time. Now that’s an interesting issue, because mass-produced housing has been a dream of modern architects since the dawn of the Modern Movement. But what is more interesting is that an architect admitted publicly that he and his colleagues had been wrong about something. Now will other architects follow Andres’s lead? How about a “starchitect” admitting that he or she was wrong about appropriate designs for rebuilding neighborhoods?

Make It Right Foundation sponsored the house on the right, designed by Kieran Timberlake Architects, while the more traditional model next door was sponsored by another non-profit organization.

Some such admission might be prompted by the houses being constructed by the Make It Right Foundation in the Lower Ninth Ward, the socially commendable but aesthetically and urbanistically problematic program sponsored by Brad Pitt. There is no questioning this organization’s commitment or sincerity about bringing “high-quality design” and LEED-platinum energy performance to lower-income families who lost their homes when the levee broke after the storm, inundating their neighborhood.

But there are two problems with the new houses. First, they are very expensive to build, requiring the generous subsidies the foundation has made, and will be very expensive to repair, alter or expand by the new owners, in part due to their use of imported, specialized materials and equipment needed to achieve their LEED-platinum certification. So the utility bills may be a fraction of conventional (untreated) houses, but what will the new houses be like in ten or twenty years?

Second, the design of the houses makes only the most abstract and ironic reference to traditional New Orleans house types and styles. Because the city is one of the most particular architecturally in the nation, this seems especially arrogant. The houses, many designed by architects who did not even show adjacent houses in their renderings, will have difficulty forming a neighborhood street. Instead, their highly eccentric forms jostle for position, forming an architectural zoo.

Elements like porches, exterior stairs and sun-breaks have been distorted to produce the off-kilter forms that are fashionable now. One house has a nice wrap-around porch, but the hip roof is pitched at a bizarre angle, like the baseball caps worn askew by many urban kids. In another, the roof pitches down in front of the facade, forming a kind of screen of open framing, as if the roof of a porch had collapsed.

One of the Make It Right Foundation houses features a “collapsed” porch roof that forms a screen in front of the house.

As Steve Mouzon asked in his critique of this design, “Oh, my God. Did the levee break again?” Formally virtuosic architectural design, perhaps, but is this the appropriate message for a house intended for a family whose previous home was wiped out by the flood waters that burst the levee five years ago?

And what cost premium is attached to this pursuit of “the architecture of funny shapes”? The sponsors will not reveal the actual costs, except to say that with repetition, the cost of some of the houses is coming down. Unfortunately, with repetition the designs are also being “dumbed down”; for example, the laser-cut metal screens of the Kieran Timberlake design are now being rendered in unpainted wood slats, with a considerable loss in visual interest.

About 100 houses are to be built by Make It Right and they have received most of the media attention paid to rebuilding New Orleans. In other neighborhoods, thousands of new houses of a more traditional design have been built, restored or deconstructed and rebuilt. Indeed, there are new traditional houses interspersed among the Make It Right models, too, causing the kind of stylistic contrast among neighbors we’ve come to expect from Modernist interventions in historic districts, except that these non-conformists were all built simultaneously.

Street view of the Make It Right Foundation Houses, Lower Ninth Ward, New Orleans.

Not all the new housing is architecturally distinguished, of course, but some of it is very sensible and sensitive, such as the Lafitte/Treme’ housing project, now rebuilt along traditional lines. New Orleans is benefiting from a combination of approaches, from conventional restoration of historic damaged houses, to the massive house relocations prompted by the irresponsible siting of a new Veterans Administration hospital in the midst of a neighborhood little damaged by the storm, to the more radical deconstructions/reconstructions undertaken by the Preservation Resource Center and the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment in the Holy Cross neighborhood, to the new designs for houses appearing throughout the city.

The combination of restoration and new traditional construction is, in my view, a much more promising and sustainable approach than the more glamorous but, in the long term, less fruitful efforts of the “star” designers.

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Recently, I was in Pisa, where I’d not been before. I finally got to see the torre pendente, which is as marvelous as its reputation, but simply one element in an utterly magical setting that includes the Duomo (cathedral), Battistero (baptistery) and Camposanto (walled cemetery). These three structures are set together on a vast greensward called the Campo dei Miracoli (Field of Miracles), a place that really lives up to its name.

The Leaning Tower of Pisa, famous for its departure from the vertical, should instead be recognized as a great architectural work of the Tuscan proto-Renaissance. But few of the column capitals remain from the original 12th-century construction, having been nearly all replaced due to the deterioration of the original stone. Does this mean that the tower is not only leaning, but fake? Does authenticity depend on the age of the material?

Of course, opinion and taste will vary, but I think there is very little in architecture more beautiful than the Tuscan Romanesque of the 11th and 12th centuries, which features a simplified but very noble classical expression with restrained ornament, carefully limited materials palette and proportions that lean toward the circle and square – with the semi-circular arch appearing in varied rhythms and scales being perhaps the most characteristic feature. While I also love the high-pitched rhetoric of Baroque Rome, there is something to be said for the relief that the plain-spoken Tuscan proto-Renaissance offers.

The town of Pisa as a whole is worth touring. It is a smaller, quieter, more manageable Florence, full of that wonderful, down-to-earth Tuscan character that is so appealing. But there are some problems, the most visible of which is the way many building facades in the historic center have been restored. In dozens of cases, restorers have exposed the multiple historic layers in the masonry beneath the stucco finish instead of choosing to re-create any one of them.

In some cases, this “peeling back” of the layers shows how a building has evolved through time, revealing fascinating glimpses of previous states. For example, we can see how a palazzo was assembled from smaller medieval houses where the windows were changed when the larger Renaissance façade was extended across them. But Pisa suffers from too much of this treatment: it seems that every other building along the street has chunks of plaster missing, revealing a stack of smooth ashlar here, an incomplete arch there, an inscription somewhere else. Others have been denuded of all their stucco, revealing previous transformations in the underlying masonry, like so many scars from long-ago surgeries. These incisions, naturally, occur in a random distribution and create high contrast, resulting in buildings that appear to have a serious disease or to have suffered a disfiguring accident.

A façade in Via Santa Maria, half ruined by war damage, was recomposed with brick and reinforced concrete. While it may pass the “first glance test” for visual harmony, a closer look reveals the harsh modernist geometry of the newer, upper half and the likelihood of future failure of the concrete. Using the original materials and construction methods would have given a more sustainable result – and probably a more beautiful one.

Here is a case where judgment is called for. While we want to honor the rich and varied history of places like Pisa, we cannot reveal everything that has happened to every building, simply in the name of “history.” The layering that we see in cities like Rome is fascinating, but it is additive, as each age builds upon the remains of its predecessors. Here, however, the process has been reversed; it is subtractive, as layers long ago buried by later construction are now exposed.

Some of these layers were not interesting to begin with, while others, perhaps lovely when whole, have been so damaged by later interventions that to reveal them now in their ruined state is simply cruel. To undo the work that subsequent architects did to lend formal harmony and proportion to these facades in order to reveal the presence of earlier construction is to deny the aesthetic aspirations of one epoch in favor of those of another.

The thinking behind this kind of restoration involves a prejudice in favor of stylistic rupture (or a preference for whatever came first) posing as a “scientific” and “value free” judgment. It is a spurious theoretical position that more often than not results in visual dissonance. It stands in direct contradiction to the motivations of those whose work the restorers intermittently reveal.

In most cases, this treatment denies one of the most important roles that buildings have: the part they play in a larger urban ensemble of streets and squares, which deserve to have whole buildings, not piles of fragments, to enclose them and give them visual coherence. The traditional city is always conceived as a complex system of nested compositions at varying scale levels; the modern city is simply an architectural zoo in which exotic specimens vie for our attention in isolation from one another.

Numerous facades in Pisa have been subjected to a peculiar form of “restoration” in which layers of wall are peeled back to reveal earlier construction. The “restored” façade, deprived of its stucco surface, reveals something that has never before existed, and its ugliness diminishes the visual quality of the entire street.

The restorations in Pisa are zoo-like because they actually prevent our reading the city as a continuous fabric. By forcing us to pay attention to the ruptures below the stucco, instead of the harmonious state the town had achieved by the time it was bombed in 1944, the restorers seem to be perpetuating the destruction, as if allowing the wounds to heal were somehow a denial of history. This is simply not credible.

On the other hand, there are some rebuilding projects in Pisa that deserve a closer look. These are the cases where old layers are not only exposed, but have been augmented by new construction that more or less continues the lines of the historic structure. A facade on the Via Santa Maria (one of the city’s most beautiful streets) is about half historic stone construction and half a modern amalgam of brick and reinforced concrete. The architect has made an effort to harmonize the new and old fabric, and one might easily walk by the building without noticing the two distinct phases of its visible history.

In the worst example, the shattered bones of newly exhumed gothic arches seem to be begging to be reburied in the masonry walls that have been excavated around them. This is not “layering,” but a vivisection that offers little gain in historical understanding. Do the restorers have an anti-Renaissance or an anti-classical bias?

I applaud the intention of weaving new construction sensitively into the broken and blasted walls that the war left behind. Something similar could be done with other historic monuments that are now in ruins: Rebuild the missing parts in matching or similar materials and put a roof on the building, for that is the best way to preserve it over the long term.

But one serious problem in the Pisan example is the use of concrete in the new construction. The concrete will last at most 50 years, until the metal reinforcing rusts and spalls off the protective outer layer. Then, the whole thing will have to be removed. Most likely, the surrounding masonry will be seriously damaged by the failure of the inserted concrete elements as they deteriorate.

We have seen the result of introducing concrete into historic masonry at Athens, Pompeii and elsewhere. The concrete is too rigid to be mixed with the more flexible masonry elements and causes structural problems, especially in seismic zones. Much of the recent damage to masonry structures from the earthquake in Abruzzo appears to have been caused by inserted concrete members used in earlier restorations. The recent collapse of two houses in Pompeii may be due to similar causes. That a similar fate awaits the building in Pisa is highly likely.

A much better approach would be a fully “philological” restoration or adaptation of the historic structure. This is a fancy word for “speaking the same language” in both material and stylistic terms. The Pisan palazzo, for example, might have been completed in masonry without concrete, using the traditional arches and lintels used in the original section. This would have guaranteed a longer life for the building and also would have prompted a design more attuned to the proportions and formal harmony of the surroundings.

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Fig. 1. View of the Imperial Forums, Rome. Rising on top of the ancient Roman walls enclosing the Forum of Trajan are medieval walls with Gothic windows and later Renaissance construction, including the Loggia of the Knights of Rhodes, with its classical arcade. Most buildings in the center of Rome reveal similar layers of masonry and a complex history of modification and enlargement without consciously sought conspicuous visual differences. Author photo.

We architects and preservationists tend to think that everything we deem “historic” must immediately stop changing, as if the reward for having a great past is to be deprived of a future. Surely one of the lessons of Rome is that this is misguided: The city became an interesting and culturally valuable place precisely because it managed to keep changing and growing over long periods of time without radically altering its fundamental character.

 To preserve a building rigorously “the way it came down to us in history,” it seems to me, is a goal appropriate for some, but not all, of the sites that have been deemed worthy of preservation protection. Some places really should be set aside from change, but for thousands of designated sites and in most of our historic districts, a more elastic approach is needed that manages rather than precludes change. On the other hand, the change that is permitted cannot be allowed to subvert the character already established. How to manage this balance? I believe that the survival of the building culture — “the way we build here,” as Steve Mouzon succinctly describes it — is the key.

Continuity of character comes about quite naturally if the building culture remains consistent over time, as it did in Rome for the most part until the mid-20th century. The same palette of materials and similar building practices and forms remained in use for many centuries, despite sometimes radical changes of style or function for the buildings themselves.

The later walls rising from Roman ruins often continue the lines of the antique foundations and use the same materials (often scavenged from the site), while sometimes introducing Gothic arches or Renaissance arcades. Little by little, the city transforms itself, but the built whole is more enduring than the constantly changing details, occupants, purposes and implied meanings of its buildings. The building culture, not necessarily architectural style, is what maintains the identity of the place. (Figure 1.)

The study of Rome and its historic building cultures leads me to believe that the key to sustaining continuity of character is three-fold:

• the persistence of recognizable types representing configurations in plan, section and elevation associated with different kinds of building, such as the palazzo, the rowhouse, the church and the small apartment building;
• the survival and evolutionary development of a building culture rooted in a place, its local materials and methods and its characteristic craft traditions;
• and the continuing operation of a persistent formal language, like that of classical architecture, in which the underlying grammar remains largely the same, while allowing considerable variation in ornament and detail.

Fig. 2. Public housing in the San Saba district of Rome. Qudrio Pirani, 1911-23. Not only did Pirani’s public housing projects offer dignity and generous amenities for residents, their design and construction offered opportunities for training workers in traditional building crafts, particularly masonry. Author photo.

The built consequences of these three conditions demonstrate what we call historic character. Designing new structures according to the same conditions allows new traditional architecture and urbanism to engage harmoniously with historic construction, allowing a place to change and grow without unnecessary loss. Some of the best 20th-century work in Rome follows this principle exactly. (Figure 2.) This is also what I try to teach my students to do, and it’s what a growing number of architects and urban planners are doing in places all over the world.

What if we made conserving building cultures the center of preservation policies in the United States? Perhaps, as Michael Hare suggested in a recent collection of essays on preservation (see my review in the February Traditional Building), the way to preserve the character of historic districts in the United States is to require that only materials and construction methods used during the formative historical periods be permitted when making changes or additions. For example, if load-bearing brick masonry buildings and wooden double-hung window sash are characteristic of the district, only new load-bearing brick buildings with similar windows would be allowed.

Such a policy would prevent the introduction of alien materials, like glass curtain-wall, and virtually preclude any design that would not be in harmony with its neighbors. It would ban inauthentic new construction in which industrial materials masquerade as historic fabric, and it would support a local craft tradition. There is no doubt that it would promote environmental sustainability. Finally, it would liberate local preservation authorities from the burden of acting as a kind of “design police,” constantly drawn into arguments about irrelevant abstractions.

Fig. 3. New public housing in the historic center of Bologna, Italy. Luigi Cervellati and others, 1970. Based on characteristic historical types of rowhouses with portici (covered walkways along the street), this infill public housing runs counter to most of the ideals of its decade. The use of materials, elements, forms and colors typical of the place ensures continuity of character. Author photo.

Of course, this approach violates the mandates of the Venice Charter and a narrow interpretation of the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Rehabilitation. Those documents were written at a time when it was assumed that regeneration or expansion of historic environments was either impossible or illegitimate. Instead, they emphasize visible differentiation between historic construction and later additions, virtually guaranteeing that historic character will be gradually eroded when the inevitable new construction arrives. The Roman Way, on the contrary, requires visible continuity of materials and methods, if not of style and appearance, precisely so that the character remains, even as other aspects of the place change. (Figure 3.)

If we are looking for a way to sustain the character of historic districts, a conservation ethic based on continuity of building culture, rather than style, probably holds the key to success. Recent experience in Santa Fe, Nantucket, and a few other places in the United States suggests that such an approach can work very well. The policies that built Rome just might be good enough for us, too.

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Palazzo Capranica del Grillo-Ristori, Rome. A 16th-century palace has housed the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture’s Rome Studies Program for several decades. A Roman wall in the basement indicates that the site has been occupied by buildings since ancient times. Photos by Steven W. Semes

During a recent interview with the author of another architecture blog, my interlocutor asked, “So why ‘The View From Rome’? What does a view from Rome do for you that is different from the view you would get from some other place?” This is a good question and it prompted a few thoughts that I’d like to share.

I thought first of perspective, the kind of broader view you get when you leave home and look back on what you left behind. Rome offers a particular kind of perspective on the relationship between past and present in the built environment that we Americans can learn from. Our culture is still in its infancy in comparison to the ancient culture of Rome, itself the heir of cultures still older, such as the Greek, the Etruscan and the Egyptian.

The narrow range of what we Americans consider “history,” reaching back no more than a handful of generations in most cases, can skew our sense of what is important. Rome forces one to adopt the perspective of a physical fabric that has survived over exceedingly long periods of time.

The most important lesson of that larger time-frame is that continuity and change are not mutually exclusive. In Rome, people, uses and meanings constantly change, but the buildings remain — even if they are repeatedly transformed. The “greenest” building, as the architect Quinlan Terry observed, is one that is 500 years old and still in active use.

The Notre Dame Rome Studies Program, for example, has been housed for 40 years in a palazzo built in the 16th century as the residence of an aristocratic family. Not surprisingly, it has a Roman wall in the basement, indicating that a building of some sort has existed on the site since the fourth century at least.

The building was substantially remodeled in the 19th century, and some of its interiors were restored in the last decade. In addition to our program, it houses retail shops on the ground floor, with offices and apartments above, all of which have been carved out of interiors designed for quite different purposes long ago.

Piazza del Campidoglio, Rome. The square was designed by Michelangelo in the 1530s to serve as a suitable setting for the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius. The facades were completed in the following century, and the distinctive paving pattern was installed 400 years after the project began. This is not “false history,” but the overdue realization of a great architectural work.

The palazzo is a model of sustainability precisely because of this capacity to absorb different kinds of people and uses over the course of centuries, allowing it to justify the embodied energy represented by its construction and ongoing maintenance. Every year that it continues to stand intact, in economic terms, it extends the amortization period of that investment. One cannot begin to think sensibly about sustainability without taking this kind of long-term view. At the same time, the palazzo today looks pretty much the same as it did centuries ago, so sustainability does not necessarily come at the price of continuity of character, but in some way may even require it.

“The View from Rome,” then, is more than anything else a matter of taking the long-term view. We cannot fail to recognize the long trajectory that the city’s historic buildings and places have traversed to come to us and, indeed, that is both an important part of their value and a reason for the intense diversity of results we can see. Sometimes that trajectory leaves us an integrated design and sometimes something more complex and eccentric, as objectives and styles changed during the course of the site’s construction or parts were left unfinished for various reasons. As a result, few buildings in Rome are the pure products of one initial designer or a single building campaign, even for works attributed by the textbooks to a single hand.

The Piazza del Campidoglio, for example, one of the great masterworks of Michelangelo, required 400 years and several architects to complete according to his design. Only one of the facades on the piazza was constructed in his lifetime; the others followed over the next century, while the magnificent paving pattern that places the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius at what appears to be the literal center of the world was first installed only in 1940, based on a surviving drawing.

Such a delayed fulfillment of the master’s design required two things: subsequent architects had to tame their egos to carry out faithfully the original intentions, and later generations had to accept the work completed later without insisting that the design be “updated” to reflect changing architectural fashions. In other cases, the design does evolve with the times, but there is no preconception that this is more “correct” than to do as Michelangelo’s successors at the Campidoglio did.

Two incomplete palazzi overlook the Campo de’ Fiori in Rome. The unfinished ends of the two buildings — only a single bay of each was built — clearly indicate an intention to continue the façade despite the presence of the intervening buildings. We may be charmed by such accidents of history, but the intentions of the builders were clearly rooted in an aspiration toward completeness, even if unfulfilled.

Indeed, throughout Rome, even in the midst of fragmentary remains, we see a kind of built-in aspiration toward completeness that is sometimes realized and sometimes not, but the aspiration remains clearly visible. Only in modern times does the fragment become valued for its own sake, rather than for the larger whole that it suggests. A delayed completion like the Campidoglio therefore runs counter to some aspects of contemporary preservation philosophy, especially in the United States, where we are often tempted to think that “how the building came down to us in history” or the clarity with which it identifies itself as the product of a particular time are more important than its character as a place transcending time.

Sometimes this might be an appropriate response — as when historical persons or events associated with the place are more significant than its architectural character — but this cannot be the norm. How many of the monuments of Rome would be recognizable today if their patrons had refused to continue a project, sometimes generations afterwards, because they thought it important to leave the building as it was in order to document some historical accident?

There are, of course, examples of architectural dissonance in the historic center of Rome, usually the result of a project left incomplete, but even in these cases, the way the unfinished end is left with its masonry keys in place indicates that the intention was always to make a larger whole. Only with the advent of modern preservation thinking did it occur to the authorities that these fragments should remain forever as they are or that only new elements that conspicuously depart from the historic character should be permitted to be added to them.

Both continuity and discontinuity are visible in Rome, as they are in any historic place, and we need to maintain a balance between them, but if we privilege the latter at the expense of the former, we immortalize what is secondary and obscure what is primary. The elongated time-frame of Rome prompts us to aspire to the same ideal of completeness that we see here, even when the realization of our ideals eludes our grasp.

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From time to time people ask me to post some of my sketches made in situ around Rome and elsewhere in Italy. I’m always reluctant to do this but will give in to repeated requests and include a few representative samples of the kinds of sketches that I like to do as I travel around the great sites of Rome and other cities. The point of my sharing these things is not to showcase my drawing skills, which are always in need of improvement, but to show the different kinds of information that different techniques and drawing types can convey.

Figure 1

For example, one can make a drawing that simply tries to record what one sees, as in the perspective view of the massive Corinthian entablature supporting the pendentives of the dome over the crossing at Sant’Andrea della Valle (Figure 1). This splendid church interior was the setting for the opening scene of Puccini’s opera “Tosca.” You can watch a video of the final scene of Act I filmed on location at you tube.  

I am fond of making comparisons, so Figure 2 shows two examples of a similar element, again at the crossing of a church interior. In this case, the inside corners below the pendentives of the dome are shown as Palladio designed them at Il Redentore and San Giorgio Maggiore, both in Venice. It is interesting to see how this master resolved the same condition in two different ways, manipulating the massive Orders with their different columns, pilasters and piers, and wrapping the entablature around to give visual support to the dome above. Here I made the two similar views together on the same page of the sketchbook for comparison.

Figure 2

Figure 3

One can also make a drawing that is more of a “document” to record forms, proportions and materials. Figure 3 is a portion of the façade of the Palazzetto Ossoli is shown with notes to identify the various materials, almost as if it were a working drawing, but quickly sketched on site.It is also instructive to try to gauge the proportional relationships in the buildings one studies. In Figure 4 I have tried to indicate what, judging by eye, seem to be the most important “punctuations” and “differentiations” in a bay of the façade of the Palazzo Vidoni-Cafarelli, designed by Raphael. The punctuations show a relation between a smaller element that acts as a frame or border to the larger one. Differentiations show two elements in dynamic balance, such that the larger does not overwhelm the smaller. The most common such ratio is the famous “Golden Section” or a near approximation.

Figure 4

These four examples show some of the range of things that one can study by drawing on site. More accurate, drafted drawings are also important, but the habit of recording observations “on the move” is a great asset to any architect or student. There are few places better than Rome, with its vast range of scales and characters, for making these kinds of studies.

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An 18th-century presepe from Naples at the church of Santa Maria in Via, Rome, shows the Nativity occurring in the midst of a crowded, bustling world (just like Naples). The buildings are depicted as ad hoc constructions incorporating ancient ruins. The Bay of Naples with a smoking Vesuvius is depicted on the horizon, reminding us of the fragility of this broken world. All photos by the author.

One of the loveliest and most touching Christmas traditions in Italy is the display of the presepe, or manger scene, which takes on a significance quite unlike similar displays in the United States. Santa Claus, long the center of Yuletide observances in America, has only recently begun to make inroads into the Italian Christmas festivities in the guise of Babbo Natale (Father Christmas). For Italians, Christmas is still not the major holiday for children and gift-giving — that honor belongs to Epifania, the Feast of the Epiphany, on January 6, which commemorates the arrival in Bethlehem of the Wise Men from the East. So Christmas celebrations in Italy traditionally focused on the Nativity itself, rather than on the wintertime glitz and sparkle that tend to characterize American decorations and popular imagery.  

The custom of erecting a three-dimensional replica (either life-size or at reduced scale) of the Nativity scene as described in the Gospel of Saint Luke is said to have originated with Saint Francis of Assisi, and pageant-like tableaux of stable-yards, ox and ass, shepherds, Joseph, Mary and the bambino lying in the manger quickly became a popular form of devotion. One can see impressive stage-set-like displays in major public spaces in Italian cities (such as Rome’s Piazza Navona, site of a bright and boisterous Christmas fair) and, notably, in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican, where the presepe set up at the base of the obelisk takes on monumental dimensions appropriate to the grandeur of its surroundings.

But what I find most charming are the smaller installations that appear in the churches, typically in one of the side chapels off the nave, though occasionally in front of the main altar. Here, the native artistry and theatricality of Italian culture tend to shine through in more intimate ways. In the process, we see a spectrum of themes and characters, ranging from a grand formality to evocations of the most rustic simplicity.

Presepe at the Basilica of San Marcello, Rome, places the manger scene in a clump of Roman ruins, which have been recycled and rudely outfitted as houses and an inn. The Holy Family takes shelter under a massive ruined arch. In the background, punctuated by umbrella pines, the arcade of a Roman aqueduct goes on its way.

What is most affecting about these scenes is the liberty taken with the biblical narrative, in order to make the presentation something more than the essentially private and anonymous event described there. Instead, these scenes seem to be happening in full view of the world at large. The two parents and their newborn child are relegated to one corner of the tableau, while every kind of human person and activity surrounds them, oblivious to this remarkable event. Of course, there are shepherds and some kind of broken-down inn, usually with some noticeably drunken clientele, but there are also peasants and townspeople of every imaginable description representing daily life in an Italian town or countryside a couple centuries ago.

The sense that the Nativity drama is unfolding anonymously in a corner of a much larger drama takes on theatrical, even epic, proportions in the presepi of the Neopolitan tradition. In Naples one can see a presepe in a church basement, taking up hundreds of square feet and including hundreds of figures and buildings in both urban and rural landscapes. One moves along a predetermined route between scenes that unfolded like the room displays at Ikea. Many of the figures are animated, and a complex sound-and-light show is inevitably part of the experience.

Less kitschy and more poignant is an 18th-century Neopolitan presepe of more modest dimensions that is permanently displayed in the church of Santa Maria in Via, just behind the Galleria Colonna in Rome. Hundreds of figures enact all of life (not all of it pretty or edifying) in a grand opera with the silhouette of Vesuvius spouting an ominous column of smoke on the horizon. Except for the flock of angels descending above the Holy Family, the Nativity might have gone completely unnoticed.

Apart from the familiar religious themes the presepi inevitably conjure, there are others more particular to Italian tradition. Many of the scenes represent not the Bethlehem of the first century, but a kind of nostalgic fantasy composed of a rustic village, an impoverished countryside and occasional antique ruins.

This is not just a Romantic fantasy, however; it is probably what life in and around Rome was actually like until the late 19th century, judging by the descriptions of travelers like Henry James or the poet Goethe or the marvelously evocative and presumably accurate watercolor paintings of Ettore Roesler-Franz. His images (exhibited in the Museum of Rome in Trastevere) of colorfully dressed villagers and townspeople going about their affairs in settings so humble they are just this side of squalor include such juxtapositions as the active fish market that formerly thrived under the ancient columns of the Portico of Octavia in the Ghetto.

We also know from the 18th-century engravings of Giovanni Battista Piranesi and Giuseppe Vasi that ruined temples and fallen aqueducts were often appropriated by the people as places to hang their laundry. That’s what we see in many of the presepi — a broken world in ruins, before modern archeology, in which people hang laundry from broken columns that once stupefied everyone with their majesty and splendor.

And not just laundry. The houses are built over, under, around and through bits of marble columns and broken travertine arcades. These scenes are evocations of a still medieval Rome, in which tens of thousands of people huddled together near the river with the ruins of a city of formerly over one million lying in heaps all around them, ready to be recycled into new houses, workshops, churches and palaces.
Rome, as I have written before, is all about this kind of layering of material and habitation, though it takes a bit of imagination to see exactly how this happened in the city of today. But we can see it very well in many of the presepi — perhaps best at the one in the ancient basilica of San Marcello on the Via del Corso.

Presepe at the church of Sant’Eustachio, Rome, in which the manger scene is squeezed between buildings that are recognizable as those actually standing in the surrounding piazza, including the church itself. Note the spire of Borromini’s great Sant’ Ivo alla Sapienza rising on the far left.

Other presepi take a different approach and show us not the city in ruins, but the city as its inhabitants imagine it. Some of them place the Nativity in the context of a recognizable piazza enclosed by folk-art portraits of its actual buildings, like the presepe in the porch of the church of Sant’Eustachio, just up the street from the Notre Dame Rome Studies Program. Here is a kind of artisanal evocation of a Rome that is no longer as its people remember it. Even the Eternal City changes, it seems to say, and the world of one’s own neighborhood, one’s own piazza, is still just a little piece of that same broken and changing world into which the holy infant was born. But even that brokenness has a kind of beauty, or at least suggests a hope of redemption that is, of course, the real message of the presepe.

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