{"id":19986,"date":"2017-07-17T10:00:33","date_gmt":"2017-07-17T09:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.journals.cambridge.org\/?p=19986"},"modified":"2017-08-11T08:46:37","modified_gmt":"2017-08-11T07:46:37","slug":"the-roman-modernism-of-innocenzo-sabbatinis-public-housing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/2017\/07\/17\/the-roman-modernism-of-innocenzo-sabbatinis-public-housing\/","title":{"rendered":"The ‘Roman’ Modernism of Innocenzo Sabbatini’s Public Housing"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Aristotle Kallis, Professor of Modern History at Keele University and one of the editors of PBSR<\/em>, discusses his forthcoming article, \u2018Rome\u2019s singular path to modernism: Innocenzo Sabbatini and the \u201crooted\u201d architecture of the Istituto Case Popolari (ICP)<\/em>, 1925-1930\u2019, in Papers of the British School at Rome<\/em> (2017), which will shortly be published via FirstView on the journal\u2019s Cambridge Core web-page.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Innocenzo Sabbatini\u2019s architectural journey through his projects for the ICP. Top row: Montesacro\/ Aniene (1922-23); Appio (1927); Garbatella (Cinema, 1927-30) \/ Middle row: Trionfale IV (1927); Testaccio (two adjacent blocks, 1927-29). Bottom row: Trionfale V (1927-29); Garbatella (hostels, 1927-29); Tiburtino (Casa del Sole, 1929-30).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Rome, the \u2018city of visible history\u2019 as George Eliot described it, a place with such an outrageous concentration of world-heritage-status monuments, ruins, and museums, has been largely shaded out of the picture of Italian architectural modernism. The standard story goes as follows: modernism, as an avant-garde movement predicated on a rupture with the past, grew in the north Italy during the 1920s, vied for influence over the Fascist regime in the early 1930s but eventually lost to the more syncretic and monumental official style of the regime (the stile littorio<\/em>). This story is one filled with radical ideas, extraordinary plans for buildings and towns that were largely never executed, flamboyant characters but also tragic personal stories (Gian Luigi Banfi of the famous BBPR group and the editor of the architectural journal Casabella Giuseppe Pagano perished in the Mauthausen camp system, only weeks before the end of the war; Giuseppe Terragni returned from the front broken and finally died in 1943 at the age of 39). In this story, Rome features as a predominantly hostile space and cultural context, where modernists fought their most significant symbolic battles but \u2013 with very few exceptions in the early 1930s \u2013 were crushed.<\/p>\n

During the time I spent as fellow at the British School at Rome, taking advantage of that immense privilege of living in the city that I was researching, I stumbled upon the elegant, low-key layers of a Rome that I had never sought or appreciated before. This was neither the Rome of official architecture that I had focused on in my previous projects nor the phantom Rome of (largely unrealised) streamlined modernist designs and urban interventions in the historic core of the city. It was instead the Rome of the unsung 1920s \u2013 the Rome of housing, of new vernacular styles, of humble yet thoughtfully designed new neighbourhoods appended to the metropolitan core. The historic centre of Rome may indeed be hard to describe as fecund and hospitable ground for avant-garde modernism and particularly its polemical Italian branch of razionalismo<\/em>; but just a short distance away from the main tourist areas lies a diverse and fascinating register of experimentation with a brand of unmistakably Roman modernism \u2013 a modernism that, while internationally-minded, remained rooted in, and in dialogue with, the rich cultural and ambiental context of the city.<\/p>\n

This register holds many surprises. Its most fruitful phase coincides with the 1920s \u2013 usually seen as a somewhat \u2018lost\u2019 decade when compared to the explosion of modernist energies, in Rome and elsewhere in Italy, during the first half of the 1930s. It is also a register of built architecture as opposed to the bulk of the designs of interwar Italian rationalists that remained on paper. Finally, much of this register is associated with one rather unlikely agent \u2013 the Institute of Public Housing of Rome<\/strong> (Istituto Case Popolari, ICP<\/strong>); in other words, a public body with very modest financial resources, tasked to build affordable houses for those who had lost their abode (because of the Fascist regime\u2019s vast demolition projects) or could no longer afford accommodation in the city (due to rapidly rising rental prices).<\/p>\n

In my article I trace the extraordinary \u2013 in scale, quality, and design \u2013 architectural production of the Roman branch of the ICP during the period between 1925 and 1930. This period was the most prolific and creative in the history of the Institute. It also, inevitably, throws into relief the role of a single figure \u2013 the architect Innocenzo Sabbatini<\/strong>. Born in Osimo, near Ancona, in 1891, Sabbatini came to Rome to work for the ICP and rose rapidly to become head of the Institute\u2019s Projects Team. Initially influenced by the regional style of barocchetto (a reworking of the city\u2019s baroque vernacular traditions), he embarked on a singular journey of experimentation with new forms of public housing and with a visual language that was both modern and unmistakeable \u2018situated\u2019 in the traditions and the ambience of Rome.<\/p>\n

Sabbatini\u2019s architectural legacy for the ICP is extensive and supremely important for the history of modernism in Rome. Nevertheless, it is concentrated in time (1923 to 1930) and clustered around a relatively small number of neighbourhoods \u2013 Tiburtino, Appio, Testaccio, Trionfale, and the suburb of Garbatella. In the article, I examine the three arguably most innovative ICP projects of this period bearing Sabbatini\u2019s signature. The first two were constructed: the Albergo Rosso (the most distinguished member of a group of four innovative \u2018hostels\u2019 originally constructed to provide temporary, good-quality accommodation for homeless people) on the edge of Garbatella; and the so-called Casa del Sole on Via Sant\u2019Ippolito in Tiburtino. The third project \u2013 a gargantuan housing complex, structured as a Roman variation on the type of unit\u00e9 d\u2019habitation \u2013 on the tip of the Trionfale district \u2013 remained on paper. Through these three projects, I seek to trace a singular Roman road to architectural modernism that predated the \u2018heroic\u2019 phase of razionalismo during the early 1930s \u2013 a kind of regional architectural \u2018fourth way\u2019 between baroque historicism, international-style modernism, and Piacentinian stripped-down classicism.<\/p>\n

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Detail of one of the facades of Albergo Rosso. Abstracted classical pediment on a concave surface.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Sabbatini\u2019s Albergo Rosso was included in the first exhibition of rationalist architecture that took place in Rome in 1928. Even if it was by a wide margin the most traditionally-inspired design shown at the exhibition, it was recognised as modern in terms of its programmatic sensibility, design experimentation, and construction methods. By the early 1930s, when the second exhibition of rationalist architecture was held in Rome, there was far less space for this kind of mediation of situated modernism that Sabbatini and his ICP team were so committed to. Overshadowed by far more colourful characters, flamboyant designs, and the rationalists\u2019 aggressive rhetoric of a rupture with the past, this architectural production deserves to be reappraised and re-appreciated \u2013 not only as a regional \u2018style\u2019 but also as a fascinating alternative future of Italian modernism that never really was.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Aristotle Kallis, Professor of Modern History at Keele University and one of the editors of PBSR, discusses his forthcoming article, \u2018Rome\u2019s singular path to modernism: Innocenzo Sabbatini and the \u201crooted\u201d architecture of the Istituto Case Popolari (ICP), 1925-1930\u2019, in Papers of the British School at Rome (2017), which will shortly be published via FirstView on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":664,"featured_media":19880,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[420,2472,2627,3098,3097,1619,129,128],"coauthors":[3024],"class_list":["post-19986","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-history","tag-british-school-at-rome","tag-bsr","tag-innocenzo-sabbatini","tag-istituto-case-popolari-icp","tag-modernsim","tag-papers-of-the-british-school-at-rome","tag-pbsr","tag-rome"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19986","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/664"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19986"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19986\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19880"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19986"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19986"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19986"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=19986"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}